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MAN MEDIUM RARE

Name: MAN MEDIUM RARE
Author: Ian Brown
ISBN: 0-525-93825-7

SEX, GUNS, AND OTHER PERVERSIONS OF MASCULINITY

by Ian Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 1994

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A frenzied attempt to define manhood in an increasingly complicated society. Journalist Brown panics when his wife, who is never mentioned by name, decides that they are ready to have a child. Blind terror, confusion, and a sense of self-betrayal at the prospect of becoming a father prompt him to research the state of manhood in contemporary America. Brown's desperate need to understand the part of himself that will be lost when he becomes a parent leads him to interview hundreds of men. His subjects range widely—from surfer dudes to Wall Street brokers, from a Tantric men's group leader teaching classes in masturbation to deep-sea fishermen, from pickup artists working in the shadowlands between scoring and date rape to sadomasochistic homosexuals cruising the bars for hot sex while watching their best friends die from AIDS. The variety of Brown's subjects appears staggering on the surface, but one eventually realizes that for all of their bizarre differences, their similarities are more apparent: Virtually all of these men are selfish, territorial, predatory, and incapable of communicating with the women in their lives. Brown has collected a sideshow of extreme stereotypical masculinity that embodies the part of his soul that he fears will be lost when he settles into the responsibilities of fatherhood. In lamentation, at times pretentious, of his ``adventurer, conquering hero'' side, Brown guides us through a definition of manhood that begins somewhere around the porn star and ends somewhere around the cowboy. Man Medium Rare is much more about ``sex, guns and other perversions of masculinity'' than it is about a general notion of what it is to be a man. A trite elegy to the wanton side of Brown's own masculinity as he is dragged kicking and screaming into the adult world of ``shitty diapers,'' committment, and responsibility.

Pub Date: June 13, 1994

ISBN: 0-525-93825-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
SIXTY
by Ian Brown

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BOY IN THE MOON
by Ian Brown

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MASTERY

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13, 2012

Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...

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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

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY | SELF-HELP

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
THE 48 LAWS OF POWER
by Robert Greene

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THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...

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A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.

The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.

Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.