To Me, He Was Just Dad

Men like John Wayne and John Lennon, Nolan Ryan and Bruce Lee, Cesar Chavez, Christopher Reeve, and Miles Davis have touched the lives of millions. But, to their children, they were not their public personas. They were Dad. Maybe Davis didn't leave the office at five o'clock to come home and play catch with his son Erin, but the man people see through Erin's eyes is so alive, so real, so not the "king of cool" (he taught his son to box, made a killer pot of chili, and watched MTV with him) that it gives a whole new appreciation for the artist.

Each of these forty first-person narratives—intimate, heartfelt, unvarnished, surprising, and profoundly universal—shows not only a very different view of a figure people thought they knew, but also a completely new and moving concept of what it means to be a father.