The stories, examples, and insights are the best I have come across in my many years of teaching Children's Literature. Here is finally a work that is not naive about the problem of children and violence. I couldn't put it down. Childhood imagination inspires us to abandon our reliance on inner powers alone for our relations with people and things. With introductions by Margaret Mead and Shaun McNiff.
Many men find it hard to move away from their fathers.
Richard Oliver's easy way out would have been to reject him, which at times he tried to do. Oliver's harder task, which he eventually acknowledged to be the right one, was to accept his famous father as a human being, who lived his life as well as he could. In some ways Melting the Stone is a journey around Richard Oliver's father, in others a search for mature masculinity, encompassing emotion as well as thought and deed. And at times these overlap, for the father is the son's first image of manhood. This in turn was the inspiration for him to set up a small men's group, and enter analysis.