Most helpful customer reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chabon gets personal and universal, Sep 16 2009
Michael Chabon starts off his book with a quote from G.K. Chesterton: "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly". This quote is aptly chosen, as each of the essays contained are full of a self-conscious ponderings on Chabon's small successes, and many failures, in his journey into manhood as a father, son, and husband. He approaches each topic with a delicate and candid hand, never overbearing in theme and never preachy, just simple and thoughtful musings on what it means to be a man. There are 39 essays contained in 307 pages of this book, and there was only one essay that I thought I could've done without (the one near the end titled 'Xmas').
The best essays are near the beginning, which have Chabon ruminating on the evolution of Lego, the worlds we create as kids and how parents obsessed with safety are set to infringe on these worlds, the bastardization of childhood by consumer culture and corporate movies that package and sell children's imagination back to them. He then goes on to essays about his childhood, his sexual awakenings, his difficulties as a father dealing with such subjects as drugs, sex, and faking how to install the towel rack in the bathroom. Chabon literally covers pretty much every angle that masculinity can be approached from, and he does so with flair and originality, coming at topics that we've heard of so many times before at different angles and making you see them in a new light. He's also hilarious, and deeply philosophical at times. The writing sometimes poetic, but often conversational as if a friend has taken you aside to let you in on a secret.
I will definitely be keeping this book for a long time, as these are essays that I know I will turn to time and time again for inspiration, laughter, and nostalgia.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Journey Into Manhood, Nov 24 2009
Reading Chabon's latest collection of essays on the trials and tribulations of becoming a man serves as a powerful reminder that the process involved in such a transformation is anything but cut and dried. If his intimations about his personal upbringing are anything to go by, there are many subtle and not-so-subtle familial forces out there working to impede the ideal journey of discovery and maturation most boys should take on their way to manhood. Often, the end result of a fatherless boy struggling to become a man in a woman's world is a frighteningly dysfunctional messed-up adult who is emotionally immature, sexually confused and physically inept. Tack on the fact that many people automatically assume that such an individual is ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood suddenly thrust on him. Emotional, physical and social maturity, as measures of growing up and making it a man's world, are really only fallacies visited on many of us by overanxious or maladjusted parents betraying our trust and spoiling our chance to enjoy life. The particular stories about Chabon's struggles as an often `inept' parent who needed to bond more effectively with his children stems from those moments in his past when he was forced to live as a boy growing up in a predominately female domain. Consequently, most of his early adolescent attitudes reflected a heavy reliance on the sexual influence of older women in his impressionable life. Many of his childhood fantasies were worked out through Captain Marvel comic book heroines who represented `women on fire' who passionately pursued their prey in the form of vulnerable men too weak to resist the temptress's power. Against this muddled and often comic environment that he was forced to grow up in, Chabon challenged himself to become a dependable and loving father to his children that he never had when he was a child. Yet, his candid confession of fatherly inadequacy still speaks to the reality of the world we males live in: a work in progress full of adventure and new beginnings. I recommend this inspiring book to any father who continues to be daunted by the demands of the future while haunted by the failings and inadequacies of a distant past. Realistically, we are all amateurs who are still learning to handle the demands of what it means to be fathers without taking ourselves too seriously.
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