A canny appeal to the self-interest of men in reforming gender roles.
Journalist and video blogger Plank's spirited first book addresses the problems men face in trying to live up to outmoded concepts of masculinity.
While the author considers in passing the effects of what she calls “toxic masculinity” on women who often experience its unfortunate side effects, her main emphasis is on the men whose lives it damages. Writing in staccato bursts and frequently citing experts she has interviewed as well as written sources, Plank makes the case that what we consider masculine traits are socially determined rather than innate and that men at this point in time may be more limited by gender expectations than women are. “We updated what it means to be a woman, but we didn't update what it meant to be a man,” she writes. For example, she suggests, women are beginning to feel free to express anger, while men are less apt to express fear or sadness. Women can comfortably wear the kind of clothing traditionally reserved for men, while men don't have the luxury of wearing women's clothing without comment. At the heart of the male dilemma, writes the author, is the “male shame spiral” in which men feel guilty about not being able to live up to the traditional macho ideal and then feel increasingly ashamed because they have to hide their feelings. Plank intersperses her longer chapters with short sections she labels “amuse-bouche,” most of which introduce men who are defying conventional definitions of masculinity. At times, she can be glib and given to metaphors that try to be folksy. “Freedom is like pancakes at IHOP: you can't run out,” she writes. While persuading the target male audience to read the book may be a challenge, those who take the leap will find plenty to think about.
A canny appeal to the self-interest of men in reforming gender roles.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19624-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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