Whether we’re talking about a new dad, a deeply experienced pater familias, a funny pop, or an all-business sir, chances are good there’s a book in this list he’ll love. (And if none of these seem quite right for the dad/s in your life, check out our recent lists of Pulitzer Winners, famous Literary Bromances, and Food Memoirs.)
In Dad is Fat, stand-up comedian Jim Gaffigan, who’s best known for his legendary riffs on Hot Pockets, bacon, manatees, and McDonald's, expresses all the joys and horrors of life with five young children — everything from cousins ("celebrities for little kids") to toddlers’ communication skills ("they always sound like they have traveled by horseback for hours to deliver important news"), to the eating habits of four-year-olds ("there is no difference between a four-year-old eating a taco and throwing a taco on the floor").
Dear Black Dads: Wisdom For Your Journey to Fatherhood is a powerful balance of personal story telling and a combatant to the old negative stereotypes that plague African American fathers. This personal development title is a collaboration of fathers, all raising their children together while changing the negative fatherhood narrative in the black community. Dear Black Dads is an amazing listen for father’s to be, or father’s looking to make a change through their parenting.
Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction) rocks this mock bedtime story, capturing a hilarious range of emotions as the voice of a father struggling to get his child to sleep. Go the F--k to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland.
This is the story of Roman Dial’s two-year search for his son Cody in the jungles of Costa Rica. Roman had raised his son to be fearless, to seek out adventure amid earth’s wildest places and that was exactly what Cody was up to when he vanished. Join Dial as he deals with an uncooperative judicial system, a language barrier, and the possible involvement of criminals in his son’s disappearance. The Adventurer’s Son is a story of frustration and a father doing everything possible to find a missing child.
In this remarkable dual memoir, film legend Martin Sheen and accomplished actor/filmmaker Emilio Estevez recount their lives as father and son. In alternating chapters — and in voices that are as eloquent as they are different — they narrate stories spanning more than 50 years of family history, and reflect on their journeys into two different kinds of faith.
Billy Crystal is 65, and he's not happy about it. With his trademark wit and heart, he outlines the absurdities and challenges that come with growing old, from insomnia to memory loss to leaving dinners with half your meal on your shirt. He also looks back at the most powerful and memorable moments of his long and storied life, from entertaining his relatives as a kid on Long Island, and his years doing stand-up in the Village, up through his legendary stint at Saturday Night Live, When Harry Met Sally, and his long run as host of the Academy Awards.
Hailed by the New York Times as "a marvel of storytelling," The Things They Carried’s portrayal of the boots-on-the-ground experience of soldiers in the Vietnam War is a landmark in war writing. Now, three-time Emmy Award-winner Bryan Cranston delivers an electrifying performance that walks the book’s hallucinatory line between reality and fiction and highlights the emotional power of the spoken word.
Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner first crossed paths as actors on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Little did they know that their next roles, in a new science-fiction television series, would shape their lives in ways no one could have anticipated. In 79 television episodes and six feature films, they grew to know each other more than most friends could ever imagine. Over the course of half a century, Shatner and Nimoy saw each other through personal and professional highs and lows.
Emmy Award-winning actor Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, Malcom in the Middle) follows in the exasperated footsteps of Samuel L. Jackson, giving voice to the long-suffering father whose indifferent child will just not eat in this hilarious follow-up to Adam Mansbach's international best seller, Go the F--k to Sleep.
After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, 28-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his 73-year-old dad. Sam Halpern, who is “like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair,” has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him.
In nine stories that move between nouveau riche Los Angeles and the working-class East Coast, Kevin Morris explores the vicissitudes of modern life. Whether looking for creative ways to let off steam after a day in court or enduring chaperone duties on a school field trip to the nation's capital, the heroes of White Man's Problems struggle to navigate the challenges that accompany marriage, family, success, failure, growing up, and getting older.
The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819, the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with 20 crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific, the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than 90 days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, and disease, and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival.
Part investigation, part memoir Pops is the story of a Craig Melvin’s journey to better understand his father, his addictions, and the challenges that his father faced which lead him to spiral. Along the way, Melvin shares raw lessons he's learned about fatherhood from the previous generations. This memoir is a reminder of family strength, love and forgiveness.
