Rad Dad: 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 touch: 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.
“Rad Dad is a rattlebag of the rough-hewn and the polished, the insightful and the infuriating, the comic and the sublime. But it’s always passionate, critical and, in moments, heart-stopping. In short: Rad Dad is fab.” —Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing
“Parenting is as much of a learning process for my child as much as it is for me. With a child is born a parent and each of us are trying to figure things out for ourselves while figuring it out together.” —Ian MacKaye, Musician and Parent