When Brandon was born, Michael Quinn Patton began pondering how best to celebrate the day his son would become a man. As a sociologist, Patton was intrigued with the rich history of coming-of-age rites of passage for young men, dating to ancient tribal cultures. But as a humanist he was wary of contemporary men's movements and their stressing of new age spiritualities. When Brandon turned 18, Patton took his son to a place of mystery and wonder - the Grand Canyon - where they could explore together what it means to come of age. With an anthropologist as their guide, Patton and his son hiked the magnificent and dangerous canyon, exploring the oldest exposed rock on Earth while delving deeply into ancient coming-of-age myths like the Grail Legend.They found themselves faced with choices between fundamentally opposed paradigms: tribe-based warrior initiation and an emergent humanist celebration of father-son bonding and rational deliberation. Written in the tradition of "The Man Who Walked Through Time", and "Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", this is the story of the Pattons' remarkable journey of discovery as they learn about history and geology, false spirituality, facing danger together, and what it means to be a man in today's world. Patton cuts across many branches of social thought and belief: humanism, scepticism, father-son relations and men's movements, liberal religions, mythology, psychology, and social science. Life-affirming lessons of mutuality and acceptance are captured in "Grand Canyon Celebration", a timeless memoir for all families as they journey through the canyons of their own lives.
Michael Quinn Patton lives in Minnesota where, according to the state's poet laureate, Garrison Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." It was this lack of interesting statistical variation in Minnesota that led him to qualitative inquiry despite the strong quantitative orientation of his doctoral studies in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. He serves on the graduate faculty of The Union Institute, a nontraditional, interdisciplinary, nonresidential and individually designed doctoral program.
He was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota for 18 years, including five years as Director of the Minnesota Center for Social Research, where he was awarded the Morse-Amoco Award for innovative teaching. He won the University of Minnesota storytelling competition and has authored several other books which include Utilization-Focused Evaluation, Creative Evaluation, Practical Evaluation, How to Use Qualitative Methods in Evaluation, and Family Sexual Abuse: Frontline Research and Evaluation.
He edited Culture and Evaluation for the journal New Direction in Program Evaluation. His creative nonfiction book, Grand Canyon Celebration: A Father-Son Journey of Discovery, was a finalist for 1999 Minnesota Book of the Year.He is former President of the American Evaluation Association and the only recipient of both the Alva and Gunner Myrdal Award for Outstanding Contributions to Useful and Practical Evaluation from the Evaluation Research Society and the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for Lifelong Contributions to Evaluation Theory from the American Evaluation Association. The Society for Applied Sociology awarded him the 2001 Lester F. Ward Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Sociology.
