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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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