Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood

by Jeremy Adam Smith (Editor), Tomas Moniz (Editor)

Rad Dispatches from the Frontiers of Fatherhood combines the best pieces from the award-winning zine Rad Dad and from the blog Daddy Dialectic, two kindred publications that have tried to explore parenting as political territory. Both of these projects have pushed the conversation around fathering beyond the safe, apolitical focus most books and websites stick to; they have not been complacent but have worked hard to create a diverse, multi-faceted space in which to grapple with the complexity of fathering.

Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle. With grace and honesty and strength, Rad Dad’s writers tackle all the issues that other parenting guides are afraid to the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, the emotions of sperm donation, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.

Contributors

Steve Almond, Jack Amoureux, Mike Araujo, Mark Andersen, Jeff Chang, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jeff Conant, Sky Cosby, Jason Denzin, Cory Doctorow, Craig Elliott, Chip Gagnon, Keith Hennessy, David L. Hoyt, Simon Knapus, Ian MacKaye, Tomas Moniz, Zappa Montag, Raj Patel, Jeremy Adam Smith, Jason Sperber, Burke Stansbury, Shawn Taylor, Tata, Jeff West, and Mark Whiteley.

201 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2011

About the author

Jeremy Adam Smith is the author of The Daddy Shift, forthcoming from Beacon Press in June 2009; co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Co. in January 2010; and co-editor of Are We Born Racist?, which Beacon Press will publish in Spring 2010.

He is senior editor of Greater Good magazine, published by the U.C. Berkeley Greater Good Science Center. “Greater Good magazine offers the best coverage anywhere of the emerging science of empathy, altruism and compassion--plus the writing makes technical findings a pleasure to read about,” says Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence.

Jeremy is also the founder of Daddy Dialectic, a group blog that explores the experiences of twenty-first-century dads, which has earned praise from the Washington Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and many corners of the blogosphere.

His essays, short stories, and articles on parenting, popular culture, urban life, and politics have appeared in AlterNet, The Nation, Mothering, Mothers Movement Online, Our Stories, Public Eye, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Wired, and numerous other periodicals and books, most recently the anthology Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power. Jeremy has also been interviewed by many media outlets, including The New York Times, USA Today, Nightline, The Forum with Michael Krasny, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, KPFA, Newhouse News Service, Toronto Star, SF Weekly, and Chicago Reader.

His book, The Daddy Shift, will tell the stories of fathers who have embraced caregiving and egalitarian marriages, explore the hopes and ideals that inform their choices, and analyze the economic and social developments that have made their choices possible. “Forty years ago, a man who wanted to share child-care equally with his wife would have been called 'deviant' and a wife who wanted him to would have been condemned as an 'unnatural' mother,” says Stephanie Coontz, historian and author of Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. “The Daddy Shift shows how far we have come and how much we have to gain by completing this revolution in marriage and parenthood.”