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Letters to My Son: A Father's Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love
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About Letters To My Son: A Father's Wisdom On
Product Description Essential Wisdom for a Life Well Lived with Three New Chapters Included At once spiritual and practical, Letters to My Son has been beloved by readers from all walks of life, including single mothers seeking guidance in raising a son, fathers looking to share a voice of clarity about life’s most important issues, and young men wanting an intelligent, sensitive, and streetwise companion on the journey toward a worthy manhood. In this twentieth anniversary edition, Kent Nerburn adds to his classic reflections on love, marriage, travel, money and wealth, tragedy and suffering, spirituality, sex, and the true meaning of strength, with new chapters on sexual identity and the difficulty of moving on (from relationships, homes, and stages of life). Unique in its profound simplicity and timeless insight, Letters to My Son is a book to savor and a gift to give to anyone looking for clear and gentle guidance on the big issues in life. Review In these letters, Nerburn’s son has been given a gift that few people ever receive from anyone, let alone their fathers; we’re fortunate to be able to look over his son’s shoulder as he reads them.” — Yoga Journal These thoughtful, serious essays are delightfully lyrical in tone....The results are always engaging.” — Library Journal Nerburn delivers an eloquent spiritual philosophy to fathers in a way that men can easily hear.” — Utne Reader Magic...Nerburn bequeaths his son a legacy of wisdom about marriage, fatherhood, infidelity, wanderlust, war, work, aging, and death.” — Publishers Weekly About the Author A two-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award, Kent Nerburn is the author of thirteen books on spirituality and Native American themes, including Simple Truths, Neither Wolf nor Dog, and Chief Joseph and the Flight of the Nez Perce (featured on the History Channel). He lives in northern Minnesota. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction This is not a book I intended to write. The world is full enough of grand moralizing and private visions. The last thing I ever intended was to risk adding my name to the long list of those involved in such endeavors. Then, in midlife, everything changed. I was surprised with the birth of a son. Suddenly, issues that I had wrestled with in the course of my life and questions that I had long since put to rest rose up again in the eyes of my child. I saw before me a person who would have to make his way through the tangle of life by such lights as he could find. It was, and is, incumbent upon me to guide him. For now this is easy. His life does not extend much beyond his reach. I can take him by the hand and lead him. But before long he will have to set out on his own. Where, then, will he find the hands to guide him? I look around and I am concerned. The world is a cacophony of contrary visions, viewpoints, and recriminations. Yeats’s ominous warning that the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity seems to have come to pass. Good men everywhere realize that the world we have made is also the world we have failed, that our brightest dreams and our greatest fears lurk just over the horizon. Acutely aware of both, we stand mute, driven by our hopes, silenced by our doubts. I can no longer afford this silence. I want my son to be a man of good heart who reaches out to the world around him with an open mind and a gentle touch. I want him to be a man of belief, but not a man of judgment. I want him to have explored his own moral landscape so that he will not unwittingly do harm to himself or others. To be such a man he needs to hear voices that speak with empathy, compassion, and realism about the issues of becoming a man. And so I take my place among those attempting to pro- vide such a voice. I bring to the task such skills as I have: a love of the lan- guage; a belief in the higher visions of the human species;
