Life Without Father: Influences of an Unknown Man

Wartman, William

ISBN 10: 0531150747 ISBN 13: 9780531150740

Publisher: Franklin Watts, 1988

Synopsis

The story of the author's psychological battle with the fear that he may have a terminal illness, his efforts to understand a father who died young, and to know his own son, who lives with his divorced wife

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Having lost his father when he was twotold he was dead, he was actually in prisonfreelance journalist Wartman argues that you can't miss someone you've never known. Yet he further contends that not to acknowledge the reason for a father's absence and refusing to tell a child about him can cause emotional problems like a sense of abandonment or having caused the father's departure, along with a fear of future hurt by others. At age 31, the author convinced himself that, like his father at the same age, he was dying of a brain tumor, a fixation expressed with symptoms of hypoglycemia and since successfully treated. The experience led him to undertake this study of fatherless children. He interviewed his own reluctant family and people who as children had suffered deprivation and fears like his, focusing his queries on what children need and want from their fathers. Wartman notes that the information thus gleaned has caused him to work hard, despite his divorce, to relate positively to his son hoping to spare him his own experience. The author also writes that from his quest he has achieved a sense of personal identity rooted in a belated discovery of his father's character.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

His own father having died at 31 of a brain tumor, Wartman was terrified when, at the same age, he experienced bizarre physical symptoms. Though his ailment was minor, the experience triggered a long-buried desire to learn more about his father and to discover whether others, raised without knowing their fathers, felt the same way. Finding fatherlessness to be a very emotional subject, he tells his story, and those of others, with great sensitivity. He discovered that the absent father has a profound effect on those left behind; that fatherless children idealize, rationalize, and repress their feelings about their fathers throughout their lives. That Wartman himself is a divorced, noncustodial father complicated his own reactions to what he found in this study. Well written and timely. Susan B. Hagloch, Tuscarawas Cty. P.L., New Philadelphia, Ohio
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Franklin Watts
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0531150747
• ISBN 13: 9780531150740
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 277