FIRE IN THE BELLY: On Being a Man

by Sam Keen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1991

Keen (The Passionate Life, 1983; What to Do When You're Bored and Blue, 1980, etc.), a consulting editor for Psychology Today, offers a blueprint for discarding the labels of sissy, weakling, wimp, and queer, and achieving manhood. Keen structures his new book around an in-depth Psychology Today questionnaire (reprinted here) about What Makes an Ideal Man?--which received 6,000 replies (Jesus and Gandhi won as the top ideal men). His argument is that men cannot find themselves without separating from the world of WOMAN. This comes with chapter titles such as ""Men's Unconscious Bondage to WOMAN"" that look taken from a 100-year-old copy of Phrenology Today. The psychosocial/mythanalytic jargon is unrelenting, but through it we see how war, work, and sex impoverish and alienate men, and how ""authentic manhood has always been defined by a vision of how we fit into the universe and by the willingness to undertake an appropriate task or vocation."" Keen traces a ""spiritual journey into the self men must undertake in our time,"" and names the resulting ""heroic virtues"" of that journey (wonder, empathy, moral outrage, and so on) while warning that there is ""no Shake 'n Bake identity, no microwave masculinity, no easy formula for authentic manhood."" Some undeniably wise ideas and quotes from groat thinkers hang like raisins in a bread pudding. Read Robert Bly's Iron John (1990) instead.

Pub Date: March 15, 1991

ISBN: 0553351370

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION