Wordsworth wrote that the child is the father to the man, and in On Fatherhood, Randy Boyagoda asks why that might be. Matching his own personal experience-he has four daughters and cares for his own eighty-year old father-to a great array of reading and watching, On Fatherhood is a wide-ranging exploration of the joyful difficulties, and difficult joys, of being a father in the twenty-first century.