Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology

by Jack Franklin, Jr. Abbott

Overview

By turns touching, funny, poignant, and painful, Boyhood chronicles the road to manhood through the personal narratives and poems of accomplished writers from around the world. Contributors include Shepherd Bliss, Robert Bly, Edward Field, John Gilgun, Fred Wei-han Ho, Terry A. Kupers, Rakesh Ratti, John Silva, Malidoma P. Somé, Sy Safransky, Bhante Wimala, and many others.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299157548
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	03/15/1998
Edition description:	2nd Revised ed.
Pages:	290
Sales rank:	568,711
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Abbott, Franklin

Editorial Reviews

Though some of these more than 40 personal accounts of boyhood convey the exquisite angst spawned by the contemporary men's movement, the broad range of experiences should strike many chords. A first section groups stories of emerging boyhood: Gordon Murray links childhood bullying to the macho bluster of the Gulf War, while Shepherd Bliss, the son of a career soldier, laments his circumcision and his family's warrior culture. In a second section, on family life, Oka Martin recalls the masculine dominance of traditional Nigerian society, while the Maltese-born John Mifsud learns of the WW II heroism of a father whose Alzheimer's disease had rendered him lost to his young son. The third section, on boyhood and the world, includes one devastating essay: Jerrold Ladd's potent account of surviving in the Dallas ghetto as the child of a junkie mother who enlisted his aid in shooting up and sent him begging to neighbors for food. A final section, on boyhood and the soul, includes Thomas Moore's evocation of how his grandfather died saving his life. The book presents not only international voices, but gay ones as well. Some of the essays and poems originally appeared in magazines like The Sun and Changing Men. Abbott edited Men and Intimacy. (Nov.)

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