Description:
Grand Canyon Celebration is a stunning, deeply personal, and profound account of a true, contemporary father-son coming-of-age ritual in the Grand Canyon. When Michael Quinn Patton's son Brandon turned 18, the two of them joined a mystical anthropologist and descended into the canyon for a 10-day trek. Patton, a social science professor, was interested in the differences between tribal manhood rituals (where the adolescent struggles to separate from the tribe to form an identity) and the modern adolescent struggle (to find and maintain a connection to the family). Through the lenses of the modern-day men's movement, formal skepticism, mythology, psychology, and ancient legends, the Pattons explored Brandon's coming-of-age while challenging themselves physically in the deepest exposed rock on Earth. Grand Canyon Celebration should be required reading for parents of teenage sons seeking ways to initiate them into the adult world, and is highly recommended for all readers interested in the father-son relationship, hiking, nature, social thought, or the conflicts between New Age and secular humanist theories. Patton is a beautiful, thoughtful writer, and his balance of geographical imagery and questioning intellect will keep readers turning pages. --Ericka Lutz
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