The title of the book, A Father's Quest, was decided on years before I started writing the book. I knew that I would be writing a book from what a medium had told me years before, but I never started it. Maybe I had to have a bad stroke to make it happen. I had prayed for years that my son would get married. Maybe I would have to have a stroke for this to happen too. God works in our lives in a strange way. For years I went to therapy, learning to walk and to work on moving my arm. I quit therapy in March 2018. I had nothing to do, and I became bored for the first time in my life. That was when I started writing. It would take me twenty-seven months to finish. Many of my friends told me to record the book and have someone type it for me, but I wanted to write the book completely by myself. I'm right-handed, and I can finally move my right hand but cannot really use it. I didn't know how to type, but I typed it with one finger on my left hand on a computer. After our daughter Tammy died on January 5, 1997, it became impossible to sleep. During that time, I lived my whole life over again. I went on a six-year quest, trying to prove that Tammy was murdered and to get custody of my granddaughters, Tammy's children. I would fail more than I would succeed. But I had become too stubborn to ever give up. After I had my stroke, many of my friends told me that this story was motivational to them. I hope you enjoy reading my book, A Father's Quest.

A New Understanding of Fatherhood that Surprises, Heals and Inspires. Fatherhood itself is a life of its own. It carries the great responsibility of raising children with the right values, giving them the best education and implementing a code of morality into their lives. In addition, the father himself must be dedicated to his moral duties for the rest of his life. These are some of the themes that readers will discover in this Fisher King Press publication. This Father Quest brings to readers an in-depth focus on what being a father is all about. It emphasizes fatherhood in its deepest personal and spiritual meanings and explores the psychological dimensions of fatherhood. The Father Quest goes beyond simple prescriptions and techniques to explain the importance of fatherhood s deeper personal meanings, as well as to culture. Interestingly, it describes the father as being one of the two great pillars of society that shape and support human life from the beginning. The Father Quest explores the critical importance of passion and love as key ingredients of the "spirit of fatherhood." Thanks to its richly-layered content, readers who are struggling to be fathers, as well those who are struggling with their own fathers, will find The Father Quest to be great source of inspiration.

Winner of the 2008 Premier Book Award for best biography The son of Irish immigrants who grew up along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, Jack Kelly became a three-time gold medal Olympian, a political maverick, and the millionaire father of a princess. In this classic American tale of grit and perseverance, the clash between old world privilege and new world courage is played out on many fronts—including the watery battlefield of rowing, where Kelly first chose to forge his strength of character. Author Daniel J. Boyne follows the life of Kelly as he parlays his athletic prowess to France during WWI and then ventures into Philadelphia politics during the Great Depression. Readers are introduced to other members of the Kelly clan, including Jack’s brothers, Walter and George, who ascend to international acclaim in the world of theater, not to mention his daughter Grace, who seeks to follow in their footsteps against her father’s will, and his son, Jack Kelly Jr., upon whose shoulders is laid the greatest challenge of all—to carry on the Kelly tradition of championship rowing. Featuring more than thirty gorgeous historical photographs, Kelly is an uplifting true story of a real champion’s profound success in sport and life.

“In this rigorous and beautifully researched volume, Milanich considers the tension between social and biological definitions of fatherhood, and shows how much we still have to learn about what constitutes a father.” —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity For most of human history, the notion that paternity was uncertain appeared to be an immutable law of nature. The unknown father provided entertaining plotlines from Shakespeare to the Victorian novelists and lay at the heart of inheritance and child support disputes. But in the 1920s new scientific advances promised to solve the mystery of paternity once and for all. The stakes were high: fatherhood has always been a public relationship as well as a private one. It confers not only patrimony and legitimacy but also a name, nationality, and identity. The new science of paternity, with methods such as blood typing, fingerprinting, and facial analysis, would bring clarity to the conundrum of fatherhood—or so it appeared. Suddenly, it would be possible to establish family relationships, expose adulterous affairs, locate errant fathers, unravel baby mix-ups, and discover one’s true race and ethnicity. Tracing the scientific quest for the father up to the present, with the advent of seemingly foolproof DNA analysis, Nara Milanich shows that the effort to establish biological truth has not ended the quest for the father. Rather, scientific certainty has revealed the fundamentally social, cultural, and political nature of paternity. As Paternity shows, in the age of modern genetics the answer to the question “Who’s your father?” remains as complicated as ever.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. “An accomplished, clear-eyed, and affecting memoir about a man who is at once ordinary and extraordinary.”—Forward Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage. In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father’s—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.