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3.5 

Manhood for Amateurs

By Michael Chabon
Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect.

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: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, 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’s 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, are like 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.

At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.

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33 Reviews

3.5
“It always feels odd to me to ‘review’ someone’s self narrative. Their story, their telling, how rarely we get to author our own. For this reason, I’ll make this brief. I enjoy Chabon’s fiction and this follows a similar pattern, logical, well thought out upfront and becomes increasingly chaotic towards the middle and end. As is, I assume, the hope of most autobiographical work, it provided insights that were vulnerable, intimate, ordinary and sometimes uncomfortable. He reveals he is a nerd at heart (and the proud father of 4 more), has some obsessive compulsions that appear in his daily life and writing, a willingness to marry almost any willing participant and a lot of big feelings about legos. A quick and somewhat charming read, that ultimately left me a wanting.”
“Apparently this was written as a sort of response to the furor over Chabon's wife's statement that http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1896848,00.html . Honestly, I didn't read this book as a response, but an author's intention does not mandate that the reader see things that way. This is a series of essays, often very funny essays, that cover Chabon's life from early (age just over 5, when he's introduced to his younger brother) through his oldest child's bat mitzvah. At times it seemed as though he was trying too hard to show the warts, which made me wonder what wasn't shown. Why these incidents, and not others? Were these chosen to illustrate his intense love for his wife? How he, too, could be a "bad father"? That he was human, and his wife merely loved a human? I also failed to read this as a "manifesto" for being a man. But perhaps that's because I'm female and... oh, I don't know. What dropped this from a 4 to a 3 was the occasional pretension in the writing. Example? Talking about pommes frites, not french fries. "Freedom fries" is ironic, pommes frites is pretensions.”

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