‘The Children We Left Behind’ puts a face on America’s fatherlessness crisis

Think of that joke meme from “The Simpsons,” the one in which a character asks, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

It pokes fun at the kind of people we modern Americans call “pearl-clutchers.” Whenever someone asks the question honestly — what is the effect of this music, this culture, on children? — our impulse is to smack it down with snarky comedy. After all, people who worry about what we’re doing to children are all prudes who really want to spoil our adult fun.

‘The Children We Left Behind’ includes enough of Coleman’s personal experience to connect the reader to a real person, a real child, who lived out the dysfunction the book identifies in society as a whole.

And anyway, what’s the big

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