A feckless but at times morbidly captivating catalog of misconduct and misfortune.
In this scattershot treatise Daw, a trauma surgeon, identifies machismo as a pattern of reckless, violent, sexist, domineering, thoroughly jackassed behavior and thinking produced by a surfeit of testosterone, especially in adolescent males.
The list of health problems Daw links to machismo is a long one. Macho men, he avers, are prone to smoking, drinking, car crashes, football injuries and hunting accidents. Their love of loud music leads to deafness, he warns, and their disdain for motorcycle helmets to brain damage. He notes that domestic abuse by men kills 1,500 women a year and that countless marriages fail because of macho habits ranging from uncommunicativeness to neglect of the female orgasm. (“Alligators and crocodiles spend more time on foreplay than humans do,” he somehow observes.) And the propensity for challenging eye contact among the macho, he insists, gets them killed in countless miscellaneous contexts from road-rage incidents to hostage situations. Daw’s unfocused analysis of male stupidity, boorishness and bravado, highlighted by pained memories of his own youthful misadventures, isn’t exactly original. Its most distinctive feature is his trauma surgeon’s sensitivity to the harm that befalls the incautious and impaired, and his critique eventually wanders off into a tutorial on bizarre modes of death and dismemberment. Daw wallows in case studies of freak accidents and random maimings: electrocution by light-bulb chain; suffocation by beach-hole cave-in; decapitation by flying lawn-mower blade. Dogs provoked by careless eye contact are a special fixation, but he rehearses many animal-attack scenarios, from sharks to moose to killer bees. (“If the bees’ relatives visit you, run!”) This all goes well beyond the subject of excessive masculinity; indeed, some of the dangers that haunt the author—skin cancer from beauty tanning; long hairdos and flowing scarves that get snagged in machinery à la Isadora Duncan—are downright feminine. Daw’s meandering text rides innumerable hobbyhorses around in circles, lurching haphazardly from grisly mayhem to icky sexology to tossed-off investment tips. The result is less a sustained argument than a fretful, disjointed, repetitive tour of one man’s obsessions, but the many reports of outlandish carnage do make for a diverting browse.
A feckless but at times morbidly captivating catalog of misconduct and misfortune.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467961721
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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