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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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