Word: manhoods
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is the city of the author's youth and early manhood, a fact conspicuously observed by a charming narrator named Mario. Vargas Llosa is an artful dissembler. He appears to have taken the defensible position that since most autobiographies are figments of self-serving imaginations, one might as well accept memory as a fiction machine and get on with it. Mercifully he lightens this intellectual load by turning his life into a soap opera and putting its popular conventions to higher literary uses. Banalities become oddly resonant and trivialities bristle with jeopardy. Episodes of scandal, lunacy and mayhem...
Donald Bell doesn't believe in the traditional American conception of manhood that colors virtually every aspect of our lives, from Cambridge classroom to Texas taproom. That's why he shared his feelings with his history class, and that's why he has written Being a Man: The Paradox of Masculinity. In today's changing world, Bell argues, the traditional image of the unemotional, super-competent male achiever is both outmoded and destructive...
This is an increasingly popular and provocative notion, but Bell fails to explain why. His book, based on the anecdotal evidence of 100 conversations with various white-middle class men is intended as a "progress report" on the changes in man's concept of manhood brought on by the women's movement and the vaguely defined technological-economic changes of the 60s and 70s. This is a mushy premise to start from inevitably it produces mushy conclusion. Here they are: Men today are torn between their desire for more equal partnership; men want close male friendships, but find emotional intimacy...
...heart of Bell's exposition, however, is a breathtakingly frank account of his personal struggle in redefine manhood. Indeed, at times the interviews with other men and allusions to psychological studies seem like a scientific vencer for what may be Bell's deeper purpose. You get the feeling that must of the book is no much rationalization for Bell's desire to analyze his own life...
...sensitive young man daring to be honest with himself and to seek out meaningful changes in his own way of life so that others might benefit. Thus, if Bell's definition of the "paradox of masculinity"--that in a changing world men must seek self-created notions of manhood, rather than rely on traditional models--seems frustratingly ambiguous, it is because Bell himself is still unsure of the answers. He has yet to finish growing...