"Some men come of age never knowing what fatherhood looks like. Maybe father was absent. Or maybe he was there, but his image distorted by violence or emotional distance. In the end, the result is the same: a son who doesn't know what fatherhood really means, who comes to manhood never knowing father's guidance, his wisdom, his ways. And then that young man has a baby of his own and everybody looks to him to make himself something he's never even seen.".

"Becoming Dad is the story of what happens next, of how African-American men strive to heal the broken places in their own lives. It's about men wounded by their own passages, how they fall - and rise - in a lifelong struggle toward redemption. It's about how a man makes a father of himself.".

"Nationally syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. plumbs the depth of his tortured relationship with his abusive father and writes of how that has affected his relationships with his own sons and daughters. But Becoming Dad goes well beyond one man's story.

It is peopled by a cast of other men - the drug dealer, the preacher, the player, the single dad - who strive in the absence of fathers, endeavor in the face of intolerance, seek in the shadow of their own weaknesses, to become what they haven't seen."--BOOK JACKET.