An adequate jumping-off point for men willing to put in the work of self-evaluation.
An impassioned argument for asserting a more sensitive model of masculinity to better equip men to meet the emotional challenges of our modern world.
Reiner explores how outdated ideas of masculinity have been holding men back from meeting their full potential while also triggering increased acts of violence, feelings of isolation, and spiking rates of depression and suicide. Shedding light on increasingly hypermasculine recreational activities, including aggressive team sports and violent video games, he counters this by explaining how the women’s movement has gained productive force through strong support networks and increased emotional resiliency. “Whether or not the Future Is Female,” writes the author, “the sad reality is that the Now of Males is decidedly bleak. This is why it’s time we start leaning into and learning from these emerging models of masculinity. If we don’t, boys and men will continue to stagnate and fall behind. Or worse.” Reiner recalls personal struggles from his childhood and how they have influenced his parenting of a young son. Throughout, he recounts discussions with therapists and educators and cites a number of academic studies and the writings of popular self-help authors such as Brené Brown and Tony Robbins. These passages are less rigorous than some readers may desire. More memorable are Reiner’s case studies of men of all ages, including his own students and a group of prisoners attending an ongoing experimental group encounter session. (Note: The author’s research involves almost exclusively heterosexual men.) Though Reiner doesn’t offer a comprehensive game plan and includes few groundbreaking insights, he mounts an enthusiastic appeal for a collective approach toward achieving a new form of masculinity. “We need to learn how to extend ourselves to and support one another in ways that, historically, men haven’t felt comfortable or safe doing or haven’t felt permission to do,” he writes. “We need to replace unnecessary competition in our interactions with a proprietary sense of responsibility.”
An adequate jumping-off point for men willing to put in the work of self-evaluation.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06285-494-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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