AMERICAN MEN

Four intimate portraits of American men navigating their lives and traumas.

Conn, an accomplished journalist and author of The Road From Raqqa: A Story of Brotherhood, Borders, and Belonging (2020), writes that the purpose of his new book is to explore the gap between the men we think we should be and the men we actually are. He focuses on the lives of four diverse men he interviewed over five years. They are Nate, a Black transgender man living in Youngstown, Ohio; Gideon, a West Point graduate who discovers his wife’s infidelity with a mentor; Joseph, an Iraq war veteran with repressed sexual trauma; and Ryan, a closeted Native American who gradually awakens to his sexuality. The stories are well written, full of narrative tension, and often deeply poignant. “Even as men continue to wield such (often destructive) power, this is also a moment when boys and young men lag far behind their female peers,” Conn writes. “Compared to girls and young women, boys and young men are more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to graduate from college, more likely to die by suicide and less likely to seek mental health care, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, and less likely to find romantic partners.” Two of the men in the book struggle with alcohol, and some make unfortunate decisions; their experiences may not be broadly representative of American masculinity, but their challenges raise pertinent questions that any reader can identify with. As Conn writes of Nate, “He was a man. He knew it, and so did everyone else that mattered to him. But settling that question now felt easy. In its place had emerged another one, larger and more shapeless: What kind of man was he going to be?”

A captivating account of masculinity with personal revelations that will resonate universally.