Esquire for July boasts a "special issue" about true men and their disasters. At first it seems Esquire has created a regional cover just for New Englanders, in a ploy to increase sales, but it turns out we've just had a corner on tragedy.

The cover story is the stoutest: "3,000 Degrees Fahrenheit" is an extensive retelling of the Worcester fire last December that claimed six firefighters' lives. The account is engrossing and encompassing: Sean Flynn's words, Bruce Davidson's portraits, and a graphic of the warehouse that clarifies a complicated saga. (An animated version is on Esquire's Web site, but it was pokey at 56k and crashed my speedier computer at work.)

Flynn, a former senior editor at Boston magazine, makes human the men who are only icons of bravery and loss to many. Paul Brotherton, for example, had a spat with his wife, Denise, about whether to go to work that night. Without sinking into maudlin cliche, Flynn writes that Brotherton was devoted to her, and to the sister he raised from age 10, and to his six sons. We learn, too, about Jerry Lucey and Joe McGuirk, who were living their dream of being firefighters.

From Worcester, Esquire heads out to where the Andrea Doria sank off Nantucket in 1956; today, it's considered the "Everest at the Bottom of the Sea." Charters to the spot are booked three years in advance by men who consider themselves to be serious divers. They prize pieces of china or other trinkets from the wreck, not for the detritus, but for what it proclaims. Says writer Bucky McMahon: They are "the merit badge of big-boy diving, the artifact that says it best: I . . . did it - I dove da Doria!"

The article starts, and ends, with a distracting dream sequence that adds nothing to the story. Also annoying: McMahon writes in second person - you do this, then you do that - and it is quite a few paragraphs before you realize you're reading about his own experiences.

Still, the story has weight: There's the thread of animosity between the two top charter captains, the tales of the five men who've died at the site in the past two years, a vivid recounting of the thrill, and danger, of being 200 feet under, inside a decaying hulk of maritime history.

The magazine's emotional intensity peaks in the third story, Michael Paterniti's narrative on the crash of Swissair 111, which exploded into the ocean off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, in September 1998. The New England peg here is the writer, a particularly gifted Mainer who's becoming a ball of buzz himself over his first book, "Driving Mr. Albert," due out next month.

His dispatch from Peggy's Cove is replete with affecting anecdotes, such as of the Swiss father who left his wife and moved to Nova Scotia to be closer to where he lost his daughter. But Paterniti's device is only slightly less irksome than McMahon's use of second person: He identifies only a few of the characters! There is the woman with Persian eyes, the son of a famous boxer, the world- famous scientist, etc., but he names none of them. Why this heavy- handed style, when there is so much substance?

Just in time for Father's Day 2000, there's a new guy in town. Dads magazine calls itself "the new men's magazine." It's unclear whether the editors mean to trumpet that the magazine is new or that it is aimed at the new man.

Perhaps they intended both. Editor Eric Garland writes that "our generation . . . is perhaps the first one to act as substantial, almost equal, care givers for our children." He says this is due not only to the needs of the two-income household, but because "we want to be more committed, more connected. . . . That's the `why' of Dads."

The contents are wan, although I'm not a father and it's conceivable real dads will identify more successfully. The cover pop is Cal Ripken, baseball's iron man, and the article, by Mark Hyman, is largely a puff piece. We learn, for example, that Ripken mulled the interview request for several weeks out of respect and desire for his family's privacy. But there's "Iron Dad" in reflective pose on the cover, and frolicking with the kids inside. We never do learn why he agreed to the intrusion.

Most curious among the other articles is the column by ex- footballer Boomer Esiason, who's going to report in each issue on "the dads he meets in his business, personal life, and charitable work." Um, why?

Dad - in this case an Ozzie Nelson type - also makes the cover of The American Spectator, aside the headline, "Dad's Day Has Come." The point, made by Cathy Young, is that neither the left - which "often can't see past the dogma of male oppression of women" - nor the right - which "often can't see beyond the dogma of traditional sexual distinctions" - does right by dads.

She wades through the polemics and concludes that compared to the mother-and-child union, the child-father bond is more vulnerable and may need more nurturing, but that doesn't make it any less vital.

It is a surprising position to encounter in the Spectator, which prides itself on its hard political edge and is seldom so even- handed. Just a few pages earlier, editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. was ridiculing Betty Friedan's looks and making reference to the "homos of Islam." The issue's other article on fathers, under the subhead, "The law only wants him to provide cash on demand," is more like it from Tyrrell, a real man if there ever was one.