Men and masculine people often come to Charis seeking resources to better understand themselves and the roles they can play in dismantling the system of patriarchy that harms people of all genders. We know that even within so-called progressive and movement spaces, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia can undermine and harm our collective goals and damage our community members. As we seek to imagine and build systems of accountability and safety outside of police and prisons, we must also build understanding, competance, and trust within our communities around the goal of ending gender-based oppression and violence. Because there is no single story about manhood or masculinity we offer a range of books across a range of titles--from sociology to fiction to memoir to poetry. We have even included a few children's books. Some of these titles study men and masculinity and seek to offer some ideas about what a healthy masculinity that does not require the oppression of women for its definition might look and feel like. Some of these titles, especially the memoirs, fiction, and poetry, explore how men have reckoned with their relationships to patriarchal culture and what they have lost or gained in the process. No matter where you begin, you are sure to find yourself reflected somewhere in these pages and in good company.
Everyone needs to love and be loved—even men.
Based on the provocative and popular New York Times op–ed, this memoir alternates between the examination of a working–class upbringing and a cultural analysis of the historical, psychological, and sociological sources that make up the roots of toxic masculinity and its impact on society.
*Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*
In this powerful, provocative, and universally
"If you are the parent of a boy . . . this is the book you need . . .
The sixteen essays in Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson’s Indigenous Men and Masculinities: Legacies, Identities, Regeneration explore the complex and diverse experiences of Indigenous men and those who assert Indigenous masculine identities.
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Meet 30 positive male role models from throughout history.
Exemplified by President Donald J. Trump’s slogan “Make American Great Again,” white masculinity has become increasingly organized around melancholic attachments to an imagined past when white men were still atop the social hierarchy. How and why are white men increasingly identifying as victims of social, economic, and political change?
Giving voice to a population too rarely acknowledged, Sweet Tea collects more than sixty life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. E.
“A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood…a virtuosic wail of a book” (The Boston Globe), Survival Math calculates how award-winning author Mitchell S.
By turns touching, funny, poignant, and painful, Boyhood chronicles the road to manhood through the personal narratives and poems of accomplished writers from around the world. Contributors include Shepherd Bliss, Robert Bly, Edward Field, John Gilgun, Fred Wei-han Ho, Terry A. Kupers, Rakesh Ratti, John Silva, Malidoma P. Somé, Sy Safransky, Bhante Wimala, and many others.
Winner - Best Transgender Nonfiction - 2015 Lambda Literary Awards
Best Books of 2014 - Publishers Weekly
Best Books of 2014 - NPR Books
Best Nonficton Books of 2014 - Kirkus Reviews
10 Best Transgender Non-Fiction Books - Advocate
An unflinching account of what it means to be a young black man in America today, and how the existing script for black manhood is being rewritten in one of the most fascinating periods of American history.
"This is a valuable project. The editors are excellent, well-known scholars, and activists in the academy." --Darlene Clark Hine
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Praise for The Macho Paradox
"An honest, intellectually rigorous and insightful work that challenges readers to truly engage in a political discourse that can change lives, communities and nations."
--Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabes
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New Third Edition!
The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson's response to the pain and confusion that men and women experience by living with gender inequality, explains what patriarchy is and isn't, how it works, and what gets in the way of understanding and doing something about it.
What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? Based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists aged 22 to 70, Some Men explores the strains and tensions of men's work as feminist allies.
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A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved.
*Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
*Shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award
*Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize
One of The Times UK’s Best Memoirs of 2018, BuzzFeed’s Best Nonfiction of 2018, Autostraddle’s Best LGBT Books of 2018, and 52 Insight’s Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2018
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Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award. BROTHER TO BROTHER, begun by Joseph Beam and completed by Essex Hemphill after Beam's death in 1988, is a collection of now-classic literary work by black gay male writers. Originally published in 1991 and out of print for several years, BROTHER TO BROTHER is a community of voices, Hemphill writes.
The New York Times bestselling memoir about identity, love and understanding. Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton. “Every sentence of the story will stir your soul” (O Magazine).
A bestseller for over 20 years, I Don’t Want to Talk About It is a groundbreaking and hopeful guide to understanding and destigmatizing male depression, essential not only for men who may be suffering but for the people who love them.
Twenty years of experience treating men and their families has convinced psychotherapist Terrence Real that depression is a silent epidemi
Named a Best Book by: The Globe and Mail, Indigo, Out Magazine, Audible, CBC, Apple, Quill & Quire, Kirkus Reviews, Brooklyn Public Library, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Autostraddle, Bitch, and BookRiot.
Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction
Nominated for the 2019 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award
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This fascinating book traces the development of the author's consciousness as a black male pro-feminist professor. Gary L. Lemons explores the meaning of black male feminism by examining his experiences at the New York City college where he taught for more than a decade--a small, private, liberal arts college where the majority of the students were white and female.
When women get together and talk about men, the news is almost always bad news, writes bell hooks. If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse.
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T Cooper's Real Man Adventures is not a memoir. It's an adventure story--and one packed with all the requisite dark alleys, disguises, leading ladies, and plot twists.
A dynamic celebration of trans male culture, this essential collection makes visible a decade of FTM and transmasculine experiences.
A decade's worth of unfiltered conversations, radical art, and cultural shifts. --Them.
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This timely title weighs masculinity’s capacity for good against its potential for destruction in the context of contemporary debates on the topic.
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“For too long the struggle for the rights of women and girls was seen as women’s business. Of course, it’s equally men’s business and stops being such a struggle when it’s seen that way.
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Ain't I a Feminist? presents the life stories of twenty African American men who identify themselves as feminists, centering on the turning points in their lives that shaped and strengthened their commitment to feminism, as well as the ways they practice feminism with women, children, and other men. In her analysis, Aaronette M.
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An Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal Winner
"Boys will be boys," the saying goes -- but what does that actually mean? A leading anthropologist investigates
Why do men behave the way they do? Is it their male brains? Surging testosterone? From vulgar locker-room talk to mansplaining to sexual harassment, society is too quick to explain male behavior in terms of biology.
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One of 2020's most acclaimed books. A Kirkus Best Fiction Book of 2020 - One of O Magazine's Best LGBT Books of 2020 - A Finalist for the Southern Book Prize - One of the Women's National Book Association's 2020 Great Group Reads Selections - EW's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020 - BookRiot - Lambda Literary's - Salon - BookPage's - Garden & Gun's - Logo NewNowNext's
2021 FIRECRACKER AWARD FINALIST
FEATURED IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY's STILL HERE, STILL QUEER: LBGTQ BOOKS 2020
FEATURED IN BOOK RIOT'S INDIE PRESS ROUND-UP: 10 GREAT NEW RELEASES FOR SUMMER
Standing between you and the man you CAN be is one thing: The Mask of Masculinity.
In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.
A New York Times Bestseller!
Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.
From a leading journalist and activist comes a brave, beautifully wrought memoir.
Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity--a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parre as Shimizu--aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen.
High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J.
East Meets Black examines the making and remaking of race and masculinity through the racialization of Asian and black men, an important means to secure class and racial privilege, wealth, and status in the post-civil rights era. The making of race and masculinity seems quite a moralizing comparison, for Asian and black men in neoliberal America are cast by white supremacy as oppositional.
Long considered a pervasive value of Latino cultures both south and north of the US border, machismo—a hypermasculinity that obliterates any other possible influences on men’s attitudes and behavior—is still used to define Latino men and boys in the larger social narrative.
In a world that thrives on aggression and physical force, male violence has become an all-too-frequent response to the frustrations and anxieties that fill men's lives. As a result, the lives of women and children have suffered dramatically, as society has come to tolerate their victimization.
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Here is a stunning new book that succeeds in doing nothing less than chronicling the social transformation of masculinity over a three-decade span. Through thematically arranged essays by leading experts, Voice Male illustrates how a growing movement of men is redefining masculinity.
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Inspired by the award-winning poet and actor’s acclaimed one-man play, a powerful coming-of-age memoir that reimagines masculinity for the twenty-first-century male.
Ten years ago, Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man put forth a revolutionary model of Black masculinity for the twenty-first century-one that moved beyond patriarchy to embrace feminism and combat homophobia. Now, Neal's book is more vital than ever, urging us to imagine a New Black Man whose strength resides in family, community, and diversity.
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Racial Castration, the first book to bring together the fields of Asian American studies and psychoanalytic theory, explores the role of sexuality in racial formation and the place of race in sexual identity. David L.
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This volume of new interdisciplinary essays provides insights into the emerging field of masculinities and the challenges it poses to the Indian male. Masculinities research has evolved considerably and demonstrates that men are not an homogenous group but are instead diverse--there are many masculinities.
Many indigenous Hawaiian men have felt profoundly disempowered by the legacies of colonization and by the tourist industry, which, in addition to occupying a great deal of land, promotes a feminized image of Native Hawaiians (evident in the ubiquitous figure of the dancing hula girl).
In the struggle for pride and political agency, the imperative to 'be a man' has been central to the lives of black males. Yet, what it means to be a black man-in terms of both racial and gender identity-has been subject to continual debate in public and academic spheres alike.
“Fierce and refreshing.”— Carlos Lozada, Washington Post
An instant New York Times Bestseller!
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction!
Masculinities in Chinese History is the first historical survey of the many ways men have acted, thought, and behaved throughout China's long past. Bret Hinsch introduces readers to the basic characteristics of historical Chinese masculinity while highlighting the dynamic changes in male identity over the centuries.
A Taste of Honey is the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus finalist novella that N. K. Jemisin calls "a love story as painful as it is beautiful and complex". Find out why Wired named it one of the 20 Best Books of the Decade!
"We Are The Work" is about how Men Stopping Violence (MSV), a small, social justice nonprofit, got to do big things, about the intriguing characters that formed and were informed by MSV's mission, about how men and women learned to work in solidarity to address men's violence against women (VAW), about their successes and failures, the lessons which became the Core Principles that guide their work
Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine
Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, Sing, Unburied, Sing) contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a black man in the rural South.
From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power.
One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post
A Finalist for the NAACP Image Award
A Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction
A Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation
Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From USA TODAY bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones comes a “masterpiece” (Locus Magazine) of a novel about revenge, cultural identity, and the cost of breaking from tradition.
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A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet.
A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more.
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Between October 2010 and August 2013, Sam McKegney conducted interviews with leading Indigenous artists, critics, activists, and elders on the subject of Indigenous manhood. In offices, kitchens, and coffee shops, and once in a car driving down the 401, McKegney and his participants tackled crucial questions about masculine self-worth and how to foster balanced and empowered gender relations.
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Horace Cross, the 16-year-old descendent of slaves and deacons of the church, spends a horror-filled spring night wrestling with the demons and angels of his brief life. Brilliant, popular, and the bright promise of his elders, Horace struggles with the guilt of discovering who he is, a young man attracted to other men and yearning to escape the narrow confines of Tim's Creek.
In the first comprehensive history of American manhood, E. Anthony Rotundo sweeps away the groundless assumptions and myths that inform the current fascination with men's lives.
Mark Anthony Neal's Looking for Leroy is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility.
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In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity—told “with vivid imagery, with lavish attention to details ... [a] feverish story" (The New York Times).
Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays -- "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) -- examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.
This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men--often contradictory ones--have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent?
Affirmative Reaction explores the cultural politics of heteronormative white masculine privilege in the United States.
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Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men
American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S.
The fact that men and women continue to receive unequal treatment at work is a point of contention among politicians, the media, and scholars. Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions.
"A wonderful book for thinking about how to release ourselves from crippling processes. It's time for men--and for all of us--to stand up and say, 'Give us back our full humanity, give us back our dignity.'"
--Paul Gilbert, PhD, author of The Compassionate Mind
Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Law, Meaning, And Violence) (Paperback)
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Black males are disproportionately "in trouble" and suspended from the nation’s school systems.
Through the voices of 51 trans men, Baker A. Rogers analyzes what it means to be a trans man in the southeastern United States. Rogers argues that the common themes that pervade trans men's experiences in the South are complicated by other intersecting identities, such as sexuality, religion, race, class, and place.
A New York Times Notable Book | Lambda Literary Award Winner | Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award
“Charles Blow is the James Baldwin of our age.” — Washington Blade
“[An] exquisite memoir . . .
In After #MeToo, Gerard Casey provides a critical assessment of the #MeToo movement, situating it in the context of the radical feminism of which it is just the latest manifestation. Apart from its legitimating an indiscriminate attack on men and masculinity, Casey argues that the #MeToo movement has exposed a conceptual fault-line in radical feminist anthropology.
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For incarcerated fathers, prison rather than work mediates access to their families. Prison rules and staff regulate phone privileges, access to writing materials, and visits. Perhaps even more important are the ways in which the penal system shapes men’s gender performances.
African American men who have sex with men while maintaining a heterosexual lifestyle in public are attracting increasing interest from both the general media and scholars.
“A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood…a virtuosic wail of a book” (The Boston Globe), Survival Math calculates how award-winning author Mitchell S.
Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning humanity. It is also a philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of humanness, togetherness, and social politics of difference arise. Devi Dee Mucina is a Black Indigenous Ubuntu man.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
A PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB PICK
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Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. MEET ME THERE is a paired republication of Normal Sex (Firebrand Books, 1994) and Home in three days. Don't wash. (Hard Press, 1996). In the present edition, the texts are accompanied by a new introduction and poem by Samuel Ace, and by a collection of short essays and reflections on Ace and Smukler's poetics.
WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award
100 Notable Books of the Year, The New York Times Book Review
One Book, One Philadelphia Citywide Reading Program Selection, 2021
Red Dirt Revival: a poetic memoir in 6 Breaths is a collection that offers personal meditations that speaks to vastly diverse and often unanticipated audiences, naming vital specifics and moving to the poetic universality of pain and redemption.
When Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man first appeared, it shocked many with its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in maturity. Isherwood's favorite of his own novels, it now stands as a classic lyric meditation on life as an outsider.
In Meander Belt M. Randal O’Wain offers a reflection on how a working-class boy from Memphis, Tennessee, came to fall in love with language, reading, writing, and the larger world outside of the American South.
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Latinx hypersexualized lovers or kingpin predators pulsate from our TVs, smartphones, and Hollywood movie screens. Tweets from the executive office brand Latinxs as bad-hombre hordes and marauding rapists and traffickers. A-list Anglo historical figures like Billy the Kid haunt us with their toxic masculinities.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family?
A boldly illustrated picture book read-aloud about how everyone gets sad—ninjas, wrestlers, knights, superheroes, everyone . . . even daddies have emotions!
Did you know wrestlers have feelings? And knights. Even superheroes and ninjas feel sad sometimes. In fact everyone has feelings—especially dads who love their children!
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A guide that helps parents focus on their children's unique strengths and inclinations rather than on gendered stereotypes to more effectively bring out the best in their individual children, for parents of infants to middle schoolers.
Reliance on Gendered Stereotypes Negatively Impacts Kids
Franny's Father is a Feminist. It's simple, really! He knows that girls can do anything boys can do, and raises Franny to believe that she deserves all the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities to fulfill her dreams that he had.
Boys can be anything they want to be! This timely book joins and expands the gender-role conversation and gives middle-grade boys a welcome alternative message: that masculinity can mean many things.
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What if heroes were celebrated for the power of their hearts instead of their swords?
The New York Times’ 14 Antiracist Books for Kids and Teens
Arnold Adoff Poetry Awards 2020, Special Recognition
Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choices 2019
Bank Street College of Eduction Best Children's Books 2019
Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book 2019
Kirkus Reviews Best of 2018, Middle
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Let boys cry! This picture book imagines a world in which boys are encouraged to express their full range of emotions.
Carolyn W. Field Award (Pennsylvania Library Association) - Honors Award 2020-2021 Keystone to Reading Elementary Book Award List 2020 Amelia Bloomer List Winner of the 2019 Eureka Gold Awards Winner of Best of 2019 Kids Books - Future Classics Category There's more to being a boy than sports, feats of daring, and keeping a stiff upper lip.
Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Young Readers
A Newbery Honor Book
A Caldecott Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book
An Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award Book
An Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Honor Book
A Society of Illustrators Gold Medal Book
#1 New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer brings together a remarkable group of heroes with one thing in common: they were ordinary people who became extraordinary.
An illustrated book of biographies highlighting the inspiring and innovative qualities of forty very different men throughout history, for fans of Heroes for My Son and Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
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Jonathan isn’t as strong or physical as his brother and can’t seem to please his beekeeper dad when he tries to help on the farm.
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Skipping Stones Honor Award
Winner of a 2019 Stonewall Book Award
In an exuberant picture book, a glimpse of costumed mermaids leaves one boy flooded with wonder and ready to dazzle the world.
Combining the best of the award-winning magazine Rad Dad and the Daddy Dialectic blog, this compilation features the best essays written for fathers by a multitude of dads from different walks of life.