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Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son

by Michael Chabon

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1,3625913,617 (3.82)70
The author questions what it means to be a man today in a series of interlinked autobiographical reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.
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Showing 1-5 of 58 (next | show all)
A memoir of sorts. I haven't read that much non-fiction by Chabon and this was quite enjoyable. He's revealing without being repulsive (largely). ( )
  monicaberger | Jan 22, 2024 |
I am pretty stunned at how strongly these essays resonated with me. Some not so much, but most. I guess I should not have been that surprised. I like most of his writing I have sampled and he has an admittedly geek sensibility. I definitely recommend it for anyone who likes his writing, as well as those with sci-fi or comic book or even authorly tendencies.

It was a treat hearing him read the audio book to me. ( )
  zot79 | Aug 20, 2023 |
Meh. ( )
  hofo | Dec 7, 2022 |
Didn't care for it at all! The author spends too much time using very big words to explain his negative attitude about everything. There is virtually nothing about the importance of fathering, or even extended stories about events that helped shape the way he fathers his kids. Don't waste your time on this one. ( )
  Jeff.Rosendahl | Sep 21, 2021 |
As long as I can remember Dad kept lists of things he feared he would forget. This title was on one of his to-do lists, and I took it up as a Post-It task from beyond. Chabon's premise is that in taking on our parents' example we all feel a bit of a fraud. No doubt Dad did; shedding his role as Junior came with some guilt, as it sprang from his father's death at a young age. But Walter is not here to explain, and really neither is Chabon. Most of his essays on family are like stylish Father's Day blog posts, ending just as they get interesting. But a few get past the nebbishy premise to include us on his journey from boychik to ojciec, a trip I can still take with my father in memory.
  rynk | Jul 11, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 58 (next | show all)
As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality.
 
It’s not a chronicle, but rather a vaguely themed collection of thoughtful first-person essays (most, in this case, originally published in Details magazine) that capture a certain time and mood. The theme: maleness in its various states — boyhood, manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood. The time: now, juxtaposed frequently with Chabon’s 1970s childhood. The mood: wistful.
 
"You have put your finger squarely on the pulse of the American male sensibility ... and you have teased out some basic truths about us and our society, our past and our future."
 
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Epigraph
"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly." G.K. Chesterton
Dedication
To Steve Chabon
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I typed the inaugural newsletter of the Columbia Comic Book Club on my mother's 1960 Smith Corona, modeling it on the monthly "Stan's Soapbox" pages through which Stan Lee created and sustained the idea of Marvel Comics fandom in the sixties and early seventies.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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The author questions what it means to be a man today in a series of interlinked autobiographical reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

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Book description
In Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, offers his first major work of nonfiction, a memoir as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, Chabon presents his autobiography and his vision of life and explores what it means to be a man today.
Book DescriptionThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author— "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)—offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.
A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.
What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as—simply because—it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme played—on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key—by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.  (HarperCollins website)
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