Book Review: The Book of Man

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Book Description

New York Times best-selling author William J. Bennett uses stories, essays, historical vignettes, and contemporary profiles to explore and explain what it means to be a man. Fashioning men has never been easy, but today it seems particularly tough. Boys need heroes to embody the everlasting qualities of manhood: honor, duty, valor, and integrity. Without such role models, boys will naturally choose perpetual childhood over the rigors of becoming a man—as many women, teachers, coaches, employers, and adults in authority can quickly attest. Have we forgotten how to raise men, how to lead our boys into manhood? In The Book of Man, Bennett charts a clearer course, offering a positive, encouraging, uplifting, realizable idea of manhood, redolent of history and human nature, and practical for contemporary life. Like his classic, The Book of Virtues, Bennett uses profiles, stories, letters, poems, and myths to bring his subject to life, defining what a man should be, how he should live, and to what he should aspire in several key areas of life.

My Review:

A massive book filled with a treasure box full of articles, book excerpts, text from speeches, stories about, bios of, and much more all geared to help young boys see what it is like to become men. William J. Bennett has strained the vastness of literary greatness in order to find some of the best readings out there to encourage boys to strive for greatness as men. He has divided the book into six sections:

1. Man in War

2. Man at Work

3. Man in Play, Sports, and Leisure

4. Man in the Polis

5. Man with Woman and Children

6. Man in Prayer and Reflection

It really is a remarkable collection, that taps into every area of man's life. He draws from history, from sports, from politics, from war, from literature, from President's speeches, from prayers and other forms of media.

He writes a brief introductory bio about the person who has written or spoken the included text, which is fantastic. I'm now a 33 year old man, and I wish someone would have given me such a book when I was younger. I absolutely loved reading through each section, drawing numerous lessons to be learned, and simply enjoying the journey of being introduced new people who have contributed to life in some form that I was unaware of.

It is well worth the money paid, and it is a huge book to draw from. I plan on introducing it soon to my own two sons hoping that we can learn together as they grow from boyhood to manhood in the years to come.

I received this book as a review copy, and have written the review without persuasion from the publisher at Booksneeze.com