From Into the Wild to The Descent of Men

So, on the reading list was Krakauer's book about the wayward Chris McCandless. I wanted to reread it last year when the movie was being released. I finally did it. I gotta say, I don't think I appreciated it quite as much back in college. I found myself wanting to speak to some of the questions raised in the classroom. Krakauer did an excellent job. Tip of the hat to him. Perhaps more specifics on my thoughts re: the book later...

But now it's onward to Y: The Descent of Men by Steve Jones. I was in Seattle over the summer at the Elliott Bay Book Company, a great independent bookshop. Maybe it was the hours spent in the direct sunlight or being frazzled from incessant phone calls from work, but I got a little bristly talking to KZ about the dearth of good books about men (manhood, masculinity, etc...) by men. I've tried several times to put a dent in Susan Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, but found some of the puff-and-fluff filler hard to get past (admittedly, I'm not the best reader...I'm incredibly slow and easily distracted...sometimes, I think, to the point of disorder). 610 pages is a bit much to ask of me right now, but I'm sure she makes some good points somewhere in the tome. One day I'll get to it. One day... Anyway, among my many gripes, one was that good books about/for women by women are plentiful and the study very accessible. You'll have no problem finding the Women's Studies aisle in a bookstore; you can even major in it in college. It's become something of an institution. But where's the Men's Studies, I asked her. There's not a lot of good information about/for men by men; that is, what it means to be a man these days, when a man is a man--aka manhood, and what's happening to masculinity in the wake of a rising feminism.

So, we went upstairs to wander the aisles for a bit. And lo! To my utter surprise, next to the Women's Studies section, was a Men's Studies section (a mere 3 or so shelves, above the overflowing shelves devoted to weddings)! I zinged over to it, and pored over the spines, looking for something of substance. Most were pretty soft titles about how to be a good father (son on father's shoulders, both smiling) or more self-help (Where Men Hide. Gosh.) or very simplistic, sex oriented, frat-guy man books (GQ and Maxim columns really don't count as Men's Studies in my book) about guzzling beer and watching sports and why women don't understand this. Lame. But I did spy an interesting title (with a sort of ufortunate cover...don't know, just don't like the gymnast-self-fellating-looking pose): Y: The Descent of Men. This title is a little spinoff of Darwin's famous book The Descent of Man. Steve Smith is a professor of genetics at the University College London, so the book comes at the topic with a genetic point of a view, with the Y chromosome as its starting point. And in the preface, Steve mentioned many of the same things I had just been ranting about to KZ. I was a little giddy, reading it as we walked around. I went ahead and bought it.

So let's see what Steve has to say.