Bruce Feiler was a young father when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. He instantly worried what his death might mean for his daughters. “Would they wonder who I was? Would they wonder what I thought? Would they lack for my approval, my discipline, my voice?”

Three days later he came up with a stirring idea of how he might give them that voice. He would reach out to six men, from all the passages in his life, and asked them to be present through the passages in his daughters’ lives. And he would call this group of men, “The Council of Dads.”

“I believe my daughters will have plenty of opportunities in their lives,” he wrote to these men. “They’ll have loving families. They’ll have welcoming homes. They’ll have each other. But they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?”

The Council of Dads is the inspiring story of what happened next. Mixing the harrowing tale of his treatment with the uplifting lessons of these men–“Approach the Cow,” “Pack Your Flip-Flops,” “Live the Questions,” “Harvest Miracles”–Feiler’s account is touching, funny, and ultimately a deeply moving account of parenthood, loss, and love.

Along the way he paints vivid portraits of his father, his two grandfathers, and various father figures in his life to explore the changing role of fatherhood in America. He mixes these with an intimate, highly personal chronicle of his “Lost Year” battling cancer and reconstructing his leg– an ordeal, like Jacob wrestling with an angel in the Book of Genesis, leaves him marked and transformed by the most profound questions of the human spirit.

The Council of Dads is the work of a master storyteller confronting the most difficult experience of his life and emerging with a book of wisdom, comfort, and hope that will change the way parents relate to their children, their friends, and their own lives.

To download and read an excerpt of The Council of Dads, click HERE.

Bruce Feiler (born October 25, 1964) is a writer on social issues and, particularly more recently, on religion. He is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Walking the Bible, Abraham, and Where God Was Born. He tends to write in an accessible, conversational style, blending travelogue, interviews, autobiography, and personal musings with history and archaeology. He writes on religion from a progressive point of view. Some of his back catalog of books was republished in paperback after the commercial success of his Walking the Bible (2001). He hosted a television version with the same name, shown on PBS. He is credited with formulating the Feiler Faster Thesis: the increasing pace of society and journalists' ability to report it is matched by the public's desire for more information. Feiler is a native of Savannah, Georgia, and now lives in New York City with his wife. Linda Rottenberg, and their twin daughters. His wife sometimes appears as a traveling companion in his books.

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