In 2008, Bruce Feiler, a father of two young girls and bestselling author of Walking the Bible, Abraham, and America’s Prophet learned he had a life-threatening tumor in his left femur.  Confronting the possibility that he may not be around to help his daughters grow up, he reached out to six men from all passages in his life and asked them to be present through the passages in his daughters’ lives.  And he called this group of men “The Council of Dads.” 



“I believe my daughters will have plenty of opportunities,” 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 uplifting story of what happened next.  Feiler introduces us to the extraordinary, far-flung men in his Council and captures the life lesson he wants each of them to convey to his daughters—how to see, how to travel, how to question, how to dream.  He profiles himself as a father, his own father, and his two extraordinary (and quite different) grandfathers—one from the rural South, the other from the urban North.    



And he captures in beautiful, wrenching prose the harrowing journey of his “Lost Year” fighting cancer and trying to salvage his leg.  An aggressive regimen of chemotherapy leaves him nauseated and exhausted, his mind foggy.  In a 15-hour sci-fi surgery, doctors remove several bones from his leg and reconstruct it in a procedure only one person has ever survived.  With unflinching candor, Feiler details not only the physical effects of the disease and treatment, but also the toll it took on his family.  He writes that at one of his lowest points he snapped at his wife and children, then broke down in tears. “I was a wreck,” he writes. “Our home had become a gruesome parade of psychological disfigurement.” But along the way, the wisdom and strength he gathers from his Council, coupled with the beauty and humor he discovers in his own family, transforms his “Lost Year” into a “Jubilee Year” of reconnection and renewal.  The result is an extraordinary tribute to friendship, and a sage collection of advice for how to cultivate our dreams. 



THE COUNCIL OF DADS is a deeply hopeful book, a story of enduring love between a husband and wife and between a father and his daughters.  But most of all it’s a celebration of friendship and a testament to the profound power of human connections.



For more information, please visit:

www.brucefeiler.com or www.thecouncilofdads.com