Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Manhood for Amateurs
    Unavailable
    Manhood for Amateurs
    Unavailable
    Manhood for Amateurs
    Ebook263 pages4 hours

    Manhood for Amateurs

    By Michael Chabon

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    Michael Chabon, author of WONDER BOYS and the Pulitzer Prize-wining THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, has written an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels.

    In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and 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 it goes on being written every day. As a son, a husband and above all as a father of four young children, 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateOct 2, 2012
    ISBN9780007365173
    Author

    Michael Chabon

    Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

    Read more from Michael Chabon

    Related to Manhood for Amateurs

    Related ebooks

    Nature For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      You Talkin’ To Me?

      Dec 9, 2021

      You Talkin’ To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Airea D. Matthews: Texting with Anne Sexton

      Mar 22, 2017

      For the second installment in a monthly series of interviews with contemporary poets (read part one here), Peter Mishler corresponded with poet Airea D. Matthews. Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series

      7 min read

    • Article

      Travis alabanza

      Aug 12, 2022

      Travis alabanza
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang

      Dec 11, 2019

      It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. The post A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      You Talkin’ To Me?

      Dec 7, 2023

      You Talkin’ To Me?
      3 min read

    • Article

      Jordan Peterson: An Interview With The World Famous ‘Anti-snowflake’ Crusader

      Mar 2, 2021

      This week Jordan Peterson has taken London by storm. The Canadian psychologist-turned-anti-snowflake crusader has been giving sell-out talks to promote his new book, 12 Rules for Life. On Monday night at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, the 1,000

      5 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Sep 1, 2023

      Table Talk
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Letter to My Sons

      Sep 25, 2019

      A Letter to My Sons
      7 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time

      Nov 24, 2020

      Now Is the Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      Sacred Trash: How to Dismantle a Library

      May 23, 2019

      We yield to our directive. We kill, destroy. We throw out the Jewish canon. The post Sacred Trash: How to Dismantle a Library appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Bold And Wise Princess Who Doesn’t Need A Prince

      Aug 7, 2020

      As a woman in what had been a man’s world, I was a target. But I learned not to let barbs fester, and that helped me forge ahead.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Where Is Black Life Lived?

      Jul 21, 2020

      Where Is Black Life Lived?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Caught Out

      Oct 2, 2022

      Caught Out
      9 min read

    • Article

      My Adventures in Hell

      Jul 25, 2019

      On one particular drive, I interrupted my father and told him, apropos of nothing other than to see how he would react, that I didn’t think Hell was real. The post My Adventures in Hell appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Jul 28, 2022

      Woman About Town
      5 min read

    • Article

      Special Time

      Nov 25, 2019

      Special Time
      12 min read

    • Article

      A Zany Nightlife Comedy

      Jun 11, 2023

      A Zany Nightlife Comedy
      5 min read

    • Article

      The ‘Keep’ Pile

      Apr 9, 2018

      My mother announced that she was going to declutter: pare down the excess in her house. Much of this was, admittedly, boxes of mine and my sister’s that had been stored in her attic since we were children. She asked me to come over, sift through them

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Manhood for Amateurs

    4/5

    363 ratings40 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      A women’s studies professor I had in graduate school once suggested that the real problems of sexism were not caused so much by the ways we define femininity and womanhood as by our complete inability to define masculinity and manhood except in opposition to womanhood. If I am a man, and I can only define myself as that which is not womanly, then I am forced to take the qualities I think of as feminine and construct myself as representing the inverse of those qualities in order to maintain my hegemonic power over women. I am, in essence, saying “I am a man because I am NOT a woman.”In Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, Michael Chabon, whether he intended to or not, begins to resolve that problem by actively constructing a definition of modern masculinity.Manhood for Amateurs is an erudite, intellectual, and incredibly insightful exploration of masculinity and the roles men play in contemporary society. As happens in collections like this, some of the pieces are better than others, but all are honest and interesting, and they are woven together and organized very thoughtfully. I’d recommend it for anyone interested in contemporary gender issues, a new perspective on parenting, or just a great book for a quiet evening.Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.
    • 5/5
      Witty erudite writing, slightly tarnished by a tiny but discernable smugness. I found myself completely agreeing with him about the fear of strangers destroying a child's ability to explore the outside world alone (or with friends). There's very little of Chabon's work that I won't read. This didn't disappoint.
    • 2/5
      Often had an overwrought style, both in terms of vocabulary and analysis of his topics. Mostly just "too much," even when I understood and agreed with the point he was making. Stopped reading at page 58.
    • 4/5
      Although Chabon's fairly constant mentioning of his political/religious ideas, which certainly do not align with mine, slightly ruffled my feathers, I really enjoyed this book. I loved his views on men meeting the woman they will spend the rest of their life with and how that affects friendships, responsibility, etc. I also loved his stories concerning divorce and his children talking about the Beatles was adorable.
    • 5/5
      This is a delightful collection of essays ruminating on both childhood and adulthood and the various roles we play in others' lives. Chabon is particularly wonderful at evoking the magic and wonder of childhood, and several of the essays detail incidents from his growing up. He is also very funny, as in the excellent "I Feel Good About My Murse," as well as deeply thoughtful as in the moving "Xmas." Dealing with a wide array of subjects, from circumcision to cooking to Legos, Chabon is a wonderful chronicler of his own life and makes unexpected connections to his readers' lives along the way.I would also note that the audio is read by Chabon himself, and is very, very good.
    • 4/5
      If I were just ten or fifteen years younger I'd probably have given this book 5 stars (vs the 4 I assigned). Because the truth is this guy is so hip and knowledgeable about all things related to pop culture of the past thirty years or so, that, quite frankly, there are references here I probably didn't "get" at all. I probably could have researched some of this stuff online, but I didn't, so I stayed uncomfortably in the dark here and there. And I was okay with that, honest. I have only read one other Michael Chabon book, his first novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh - probably 15 or 20 years ago, and I really enjoyed it. Of course, I was younger then. The thing is, I seem to have gotten so much older since then; Chabon has only aged at about half-speed while I was full-speed ahead. Or so it seemed as I was reading these lovely essays. And they really are wonderful examples of writing - wise, witty, funny, moving and just plain GOOD, ya know? But what impressed me the most were the things he had to say about his mom and dad, who divorced when the author was only 11 or 12, and yet he still has such loving things to say about both of them, and how much he owes to them. So many children of divorce tend to whine about how awful it was for them and blame all their problems on them. Not Chabon. He figures he owes his slight OCD tendencies to his dad, who was a collector and a man of eclectic and idiosyncratic interests. Now Chabon is that kind of man, and is passing the excitement of such interests along to his own children. He even appreciates his mom's ex-boyfriends, who filled certain voids for him while they were around. He credits his mom with turning him into something of a cook and baker, because she was working, and left him to feed the family. There's other stuff like that in here, but the thing is he so obviously STILL LOVES his mom and dad. His brother, five years younger, also gets some print here. Same thing. The guys seem to genuinely LOVE each other. He even has kind things to say about his first wife and his first father-in-law. This is a guy who confesses to being perhaps too much of an optimist for most of his life, who is made content and happy by simple things. How can you not like a guy like this. His devotion to his wife and four children shine through almost everything he says about them in these pieces, though he is brutally honest about how they all function - or don't - as a family.I am a person who reads encyclopedically and in great volume. For the first 50 years or so of my reading life I read mostly fiction. Now I read a bit more non-fiction, mostly memoirs. This book, Manhood for Amateurs, is probably about as close as you'll get to a memoir by Chabon. And maybe it's enough. What a talent this guy has!In one essay, "I Feel Good About My Murse," it hit me why I like this guy and his writing so much. He talks about wishing for a bag to carry his stuff in and finally getting one, a man-purse, or 'murse.' "It holds my essential stuff, including a book - for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times ..." There it is. Chabon loves books. Me too. Now I know I'm gonna have to start reading his other novels. I know my son has the one that won the Pulitzer, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I'll start with that one. Or maybe first I'll try his other collection of essays - the one about books and writing, called Maps and Legends. Damn! My to-read list just keeps growing. Ain't life grand?
    • 4/5
      Have you ever gotten a bit of a crush on an author after reading a few of his books? Have you ever thought that someone who write with such insight and compassion must be a truly kind person? And have you then, having attended a lecture or read an interview of the author, found out he was really kind of a pretentious jackass? The opposite thing happened to me as I read Manhood for Amateurs. I've read a few of Michael Chabon's books and formed an image of him, not of a pretentious jackass, but of being a guy's guy and somewhat testosterone-fueled. Not quite Hunter S. Thompson, but moving in that direction. Which, it turns out, is utterly the wrong impression.Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of Chabon's personal essays, in which he talks about childhood and marriage and having children of his own. In Willam and I he talks about his reaction to being commended on his parenting skills by a stranger:I don't know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is a really good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child with simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks' worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King, Jr.. In a grocery store, no mother is good or bad; she is just a mother, shopping for her family. If she wipes her kid's nose or tear-stained cheeks, if she holds her kids tight, entertains her kid's nonsensical claims, buys her kid the organic non-GMO whole-grain version of Honey Nut Cheerios, it adds no useful data to our assessment of her. Such an act is statistically insignificant. Good mothering is not measurable in a discrete instant, in an hour spent rubbing a baby's gassy belly, in the braiding of a tangled mass of morning hair. Good mothering is a long-term pattern, a lifelong trend of behaviors most of which go unobserved at the time by anyone, least of all the mother herself.So I'm not sure how I'll view the next novel of his that I read. I'm sure it will be just as full of male protagonists behaving like guys and engaging in manly adventures, but I wonder if I'll be reading it a bit differently, knowing that the author is a guy who cooks the meals and loves his family. Then again, maybe I'll run into an interview with him on Larry King or npr and discover that he actually is a bit full of himself. I hope not.
    • 3/5
      By turns interesting and enlightening, and then occasionally quite pretentiously irritating. The jury's out on this one until I finish the whole thing.
    • 4/5
      Michael Chabon, dear thing, was in the grocery store one day with a baby and a toddler. He was, and I want to emphasize this, SHOPPING. Just like mothers do every day of the week. But Chabon is a father, not a mother, so when he got to the checkout, a completely strange woman stopped him to say, "I can tell you're a really good father." Chabon says, (and I paraphrase), "What would a mother have to do to earn this unsolicited praise? Perform an emergency tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen?" Bless his heart. Already I love him. This series of essays cover a number of topics: parenting, relationships, fatherhood, man purses. I found the essay about his former father-in-law, "The Hand on My Shoulder," particularly poignant, but Chabon writes with insight and tenderness about many aspects of manhood; each essay has something worthwhile to harvest. I should note that Chabon is married to writer Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother, and it is delightful to read the two books together; their tenderness and admiration for each other simply shines.
    • 2/5
      I just could not get into this book, sorry.
    • 3/5
      It was...OK. I know people really, really like this author, this GUY, but he just strikes me as yet another egocentric writer whose essays revolve around him and his take on life, his concerns, his mistakes and triumphs. Two essays of note for me were the one on the "murse", in which he realizes just how practical a bag of some sort is, and so he enlists the aid of a friend to find him a proper bag that, well, is masculine enough. The other essay, "The Wilderness of Childhood", was thought-provoking. Chabon discusses his own childhood spent exploring the green space behind his house, riding his bike around the neighborhood, and roaming freely with his friends, then bemoans the fact that his own children appear to be uninterested in doing the same...for whatever reason. Is it the fault of adults, who have become over-protective of their kids? Is it society in general that has decided that the world of a child must be regimented? I believe that each generation bemoans the fact their children won't experience the same childhood they had. In some cases, that is a good thing.
    • 5/5
      Chabon's book is basically a collection of essays on being a man. The subtitle is "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son." The theme is a perfect counterpoint to his wife's book (Ayelet Waldman's "Bad Mother"), but while Waldman's book stayed on track, Chabon's book takes delightful side-trips into the lands of comic books, baseball and listening to the radio.My Thoughts As much as I didn't want to compare their writing (which strikes me as horribly unfair), I got a lot of food for thought from Waldman's book but I fell in love with Chabon's book. His writing pleased me immensely. The way he puts words together thrilled me and amused me and touched me. So much so that I think I'll just spend the rest of this review cramming as many little excerpts in as I can. Why listen to me go on and on about how much I loved this book when you can experience it for yourself?Consider his essay the "Splendors of Crap." Have you ever heard a more accurate description of modern children's movies than this: At least once a month I take my kids to see a new "family movie"—the latest computer-generated piece of animated crap. Please don't oblige me to revisit the last one even long enough to name the film, let alone describe it. Anyway, you know the one I mean: set in a zoo, or in a forest, or on farm, or under the sea, or in "Africa," or in an effortlessly hilarious StorybookLandTM where magic, wonder and make-believe are ironized and mocked except at the moments when they are tenderly invoked to move units. I believe but am not prepared to swear that the lead in this weekend's version may have been a neurotic lion, or a neurotic bear, or a neurotic rat, or a neurotic chicken. Chances are good that the thing featured penguins; for a while, the movies have all been featuring penguins. Naturally, there were the legally required 5.5 incidences of humor-stimulating flatulence per hour of running time. A raft of bright pop-punk tunes on the soundtrack, alternating with familiar numbers culled with art and cruelty from the storehouse of parental nostalgia.Chabon has a gift for writing about the little moments of life and making them instantly familiar and relatable but then layering on his own unique style and viewpoint in a way that makes these essays as delicious and satisfying to read as dark chocolate or a warm roll with butter (or substitute your guilty delight here). As my Little One embarks on his school career, I've begun to realize that the sheer amount of papers he'll generate in the coming years could account for an entire forest of trees dying. So I thoroughly enjoyed "The Memory Hole," in which Chabon writes about dealing with the creative works of four children. Let's read a little of it, shall we? Almost every school day, at least one of my four children comes home with art: a drawing, a painting, a piece of handicraft, a construction-paper assemblage, an enigmatic apparatus made from pipe cleaners, sparkles and clay. And almost every bit of it ends up in the trash. My wife and I have to remember to shove the things down deep, lest one of the kids stumble across the ruin of his or her laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca wedged in with the junk mail and the collapsed packaging from a twelve-pack of squeezable yogurt. But there is so much of the stuff; we don't know what else to do with it. We don't toss all of it. We keep the good stuff—or what strikes us, in the Zen of the instant between scraping out the lunch box and sorting the mail, as good. As worthier somehow; more vivid, more elaborate, more accurate, more sweated over.In typing that last excerpt, I realized that what makes Chabon's writing so good is how specific he is. He doesn't just say "We throw it in the trash and make sure it is buried deep." He describes the art ("laboriously stapled paper-plate-and-dried-bean maraca"—who among us has NOT made one of these or had one given to us?) and the trash ("the collapsed packaging from a twelve-pack of squeezable yogurt"). It is this specificity and detail that delights me and creates such memorable and relatable writing.Yet I think Chabon's true genius is taking a specific event like dealing with the flood of artwork from your children and turning it into a deeper, more philosophical musing. Consider the end of the essay excerpted above: The truth is that in every way, I am squandering the treasure of my life. It's not that I don't take enough pictures, though I don't, or that I don't keep a diary, though iCal and my monthly Visa bill are the closest I come to a thoughtful prose record of events. Every day is like a kid's drawing, offered to you with a strange mixture of ceremoniousness and offhand disregard, yours for the keeping. Some of the days are rich and complicated, others inscrutable, others little more than a stray gray mark on a ragged page. Some you manage to hang on to, though your reasons for doing so are often hard to fathom. But most of them you just ball up and throw away.I wish I could keep going; I must have marked at least 30 other passages that I thought were particularly memorable or amazing or just spoke to me. Like his essay "Radio Silence," which talks about how listening to the radio can suddenly make you a time traveler—winging you back to the first moment you heard that song.I had every intention of giving this book away for a giveaway when I was done with it, but I can't. This is a keeper. This is a book I want to keep close by: to dip into when I need to be reminded what good writing is, or when I face the inevitable moment when my son asks me about my past and I need to walk the same tightrope Chabon does when his kids ask him whether he's ever tried drugs1, or when I just want to relax and revel in what a gifted writer can do with English language.
    • 4/5
      A non-linear memoir told in vignettes, funny, self-deprecating, nerdy, engaging.
    • 5/5
      I don't like that description, referencing 'hectic' and 'divorces' etc, very much. This book does have adult material, but it's handled with calm courage and grace, and plenty of humor (muchly of the self-deprecating kind). And, mostly, the issues and ideas he explores are universal - even Gentile Women will feel not just sympathy, but empathy. Moreover, he has that special way with words that makes him popular among critics and Literary folk, but also accessible to ordinary readers like me.

      One example of the humor, this time not self-deprecating but compassionate, about a woman at the grocery store who looked fondly at the author & the author's litte son. She had on rainbow leggings, and I thought she might be a little bit crazy and therefore fond of everyone."

      One warning - the author is an agnostic 'bacon-eating' Jew, who lives in Berkeley and hates GW Bush. So, if you're not fond of those kinds of people, you might feel a bit alienated at times.

      I admit I'm having trouble deciding whether to encourage you to read this. I do think it's wonderful. I'd push it on my son if he were grown, but at 15 I don't think he's ready. I can't see my husband or dad or brother reading it. And yet, I do want to emphasize that I enjoyed it *a lot* and suspect you would too, if you're ok with the genre and with what I said in the first paragraph. Ok."
    • 4/5
      Really entertaining series of essays about Michael Chabon's life. It feels more raw than his fiction which is definitely very entertaining.
    • 4/5
      An enjoyable collection of light and accessible essays about being an American boy, man and Dad in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
    • 4/5
      "Manhood for Amateurs" is a collection of beautifully-written, autobiographical essays by Michael Chabon. Like its title, the book is separated into multiple wittily-named sections (e.g. Exercises in Masculine Affection) and covers topics from growing up in the wild to being a father. On the whole, most essays are short yet all manage to end with a satisfying thud.Having read his fiction, Chabon surprised me with the amount of reflective grace embedded within each of these essays. Not only are they peppered with his insights about the world, but they almost always end with a particular point or conclusion. However, its conclusion-heavy nature became a little old midway through the book as every anecdote ended with a pretty moral. Or perhaps it's that the end of the first half also marked the end of his first set of essays on fatherhood, which I found brilliant.Read if: The title appeals to your sense of humor.Avoid if: You're looking for drama.
    • 4/5
      The Good Stuff * The essay entitled "The Amateur Family" about being a family of geeks -- please adopt me I belong with you guys * Essays are wonderfully written, interesting and extremely witty at times * The author is obviously a geek -- and you know what they say "The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth" -- in your face oh husband of mine who is soooo not a geek * Book starts with a great essay * The Essay entitled "The Memory Hole" about children's artwork -- trust me if you are a parent you will definitely understand it! * The Essay "The Wilderness of Childhood" I very much agree with the author -- now we have to figure out what to do about itThe Not so Good Stuff * Some of the essays are a little dry and over my head -- nothing against the author, I am just not that intelligent * Chapter on Baseball -- but that's because I am a chick and I don't get the passion for the sportWhat I Learned * All men seem to really like Baseball * That I really need to watch Dr Who, the 1970's Dr creeped me out so much I never tried any of the other versions * A better understanding of men -- well except I still don't get the baseball thing or the stooges for that matterFavorite Quotes/Passages"I define being a good father in precisely the same terms that we ought to define being a good mother-doing my part to handle and stay on top of the endless parade of piddly shit" (Jen's note -- I AGREE)"I like a good sitcom as much as anybody , but did any kids ever try to get up a game of Murphy Brown""the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head, when deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh s**t""I don't know what you need to truly understand brassieres, and what's more, I don't want to know. I'm sorry. Go ask your mother.""I am a liberal agnostic empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew, and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlie religious fundamentalism of every flavor."Who Should Read * Men and Women over the age of 13 (women just skip over baseball chapter)
    • 2/5
      By the end of this book I was rather severely disliking Michael Chabon. I really liked Bad Mother, his wife's book, which got criticized because she sort of said she loved her husband more than her children (this was a mean interpretation, I believe), and I was thinking that if it were true, it was understandable since she was married to this great writer - although I couldn't get through Cavalier and Clay either.I don't like his writing - it's too essayish; and for some reason I found him oddly misogynistic. And so by the end I was saying to myself you know what? I don't really care what Chabon thinks about this.Sorry for this immature review, but it just struck me the wrong way!
    • 4/5
      Loved it. I'm a new dad myself, a longtime Chabon fan, and I relished his characteristically artful articulations of the trials of husbanding and parenting. Well worth a read.
    • 5/5
      This is brilliant writing - clever, thoughtful, heartfelt, honest, and very compelling reading for anyone who has ever faced the challenges, rewards, and (ultimately) daily failures of fatherhood.
    • 1/5
      Many of Chabon's reminiscences brought back pleasant memories for me. The writing was likewise enjoyable to read., and at times insightful. Chabon's use of vulgar language was a trunoff for me and his decidedly disrespectful attitude towards Deity rankled me each time it was manifest. Too bad, as I might have enjoyed it more without these two negative (for me) aspects.
    • 5/5
      A woman’s take on manhoodA confession... I have little interest in "the pleasures and regrets of a husband, father, and son." I have A LOT of interest in Michael Chabon. And why not? In addition to being one of my favorite authors, we're both 40-something Jews who were raised in suburban Maryland. And we both live in the San Francisco Bay Area and travel in literary circles. Okay, we're acquainted--but in the most superficial way imaginable; just enough to say hello and kibitz a bit. But the fact that he's a nice guy is completely subsumed by the fact that he's one of the greatest writers living today. I am an unabashed fan, and this collection of essays about a subject I'm not particularly interested in (being neither husband, father, son, wife, or mother) was a thrilling read. Chabon's use of language is magnificent. No matter the subject, it's the sort of text where you want to grab anyone in the vicinity and just start reading aloud. I knew I was hooked when I began tearing up while reading the first essay, "The Loser's Club" which recounts a rejection suffered in his youth. "That was the moment I began to think of myself as a failure," the Pulitzer prize-winner writes. Chabon is vulnerable within these essays, sharing deeply personal details of his life, and letting that streak of neurosis shine through. But don't worry that the collection is one long, drawn out therapy session. There are more laughs than tears and as I noted above, Chabon is a very likeable fellow. "I Feel Good About my Murse," for instance, is delightfully silly. Even so, Chabon's got something real to say about masculine identity amidst the laughs. Not every single essay is a slam dunk. The Lego one sort of left me cold. For you it might be another. But overall, this collection is so strong that it must surely be a go-to gift for fathers, husbands, sons, and all lovers of great writing for decades to come. Oh, and I've seen him playing with his kids--he really is a great father.
    • 4/5
      Fantastically fun. Chabon waxes eloquent on adults taking the fun out of childhood, men faking their ability to use power tools, pop culture as international diplomacy, and why today's Lego toys are so lame. Chabon doesn't pretend to have all the answers -- this isn't really a "men's help" book -- instead, he admits he can't explain why some boys have a fascination with burning bugs with magnifying glasses, but does note that all a potential serial killer probably needed to straighten him out at age ten was an 11-year-old girl calling him a pathetic loser. Chabon is funny and poignant, and you'll probably find yourself nodding and laughing in agreement at most of it.
    • 3/5
      This book collects together essays by author Michael Chabon about being a husband, father, and son.  Particularly his efforts to avoid the cliches of masculinity in these roles.  I can relate to his sensitive and introspective thoughts on fatherhood.  One particularly interesting essay discusses the loss of wildness in childhood (much like the concerns of Free Range Kids' Lenore Skenazy).  This goes beyond children being able to wander around outside though as Chabon discusses how fart jokes in children's books and movies have allowed adults to gentrify what once was a means for children to rebel against the grown-up world.  Other essays are less relatable such as the uncomfortable reminiscences of his early sexual encounters with much older women.  The essays are good and bad, but the good outnumber the bad and they all offer something worth reading.Favorite Passages:"A father is a man who fails every day.""Make all families are a kind of fandom, an endlessly elaborated, endlessly disputed, endlessly reconfigured set of commentaries, extrapolations, and variations generated by passionate amateurs on the primal text of the parents’ love for each other. Sometimes the original program is canceled by death or separation; sometimes, as with Doctor Who, it endures and flourishes for decades. And maybe love, mortality, and loss, and all the children and mythologies and sorrows they engender, make passionate amateurs–nerds, geeks, and fanboys–of us all."Recommended books:
    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable collection of Michael Chabon's various essays throughout the years, loosely organized into chapters about different stages of his life. I am big fan of Chabon and I credit him with injecting recent mainstream American fiction with a shot of respectable geekiness. Reading these essays also helps one understand a little of Chabon's background and the impetus for many of the themes found in his novels. I started reading this with Amber in the early morning hours while we were hanging out with Sebastian in the NICU before I had to go to work. We had been reading various books on parenting or childhood. Our routine of reading aloud to each other soon became hampered however when we came to Chabon's nostalgic stories regarding his adolescence. I won't go into the subject matter but let's just say they shouldn't be read out loud in the presence of polite company, such as the tender ears of the NICU nurses. That's not to say they aren't highly entertaining and full of proverbial and familial insight. Although Chabon is a good decade older than me, his way of describing the hallmarks of childhood is eerily similar to my memories. For example, there is a great essay on the differences between what I was allowed to do when I was a child (ride bikes around the neighborhood, build tree forts in the distant woods, roam the streets of the Kimberlin subdivision for hours with other kids) and how that freedom and risk is rarely tolerated by modern parents. The paranoia of kidnapping, the fear of unfettered freedom and of unsupervised exploration has overwhelmingly trumped the practice of letting kids just go outside to play in the woods for most of the day. Now there are the endless lessons, activities, and play dates arranged and structured throughout the week. Chabon laments the disappearance of this freedom but also admits that he can barely manage to let his own kids out of his sight. Now that I have a very young child in my life, I sympathize with the dilemma. Has rates of kidnapping gone up since the 80's? No, of course not, but the emphasis on the possibility has. The blame for something like that happening falls more on the parents now, not the kidnapper.Chabon also shares some humorous stories about making friends, sustaining romantic relationships, his parents, marriage, divorce, being Jewish, fatherhood vs. motherhood, and so on. Many of the subjects are mixed together. He has an essay on trying to explain the concept of feminism to his young sons while drawing super hero characters. The boys are having trouble drawing super heroines and Chabon is in the difficult position of describing exactly how women are physically different which leads into a contemplation of how super heroines are different from their male counterparts on an emotional level. There is another story about explaining to his young children about drug use and whether or not to lie to them regarding his own drug use as a teenager in the 70's. There is seven page lament for the evolution of Lego. Again, well written and funny. Ultimately, if you like Chabon's novels, you will probably enjoy this collection, especially if you are a geeky parent. If you are unfamiliar with Chabon, than you may still enjoy this series of essays but I highly recommend you read his novels eventually.
    • 5/5
      I have been and always will be a sucker for any kind of how-to manual for the human race that anyone wants to put on a bookshelf. The fact that Chabon is one of my favorite authors is just icing on the cake.

      The sad truth of the matter, of course, is that these books never live up to their billing. At best, one is left with a particularly obscure set of ikea-like illustrations, suggesting that while there is some particular road upon which one can tread, finding it will require luck more than words.

      But although Chabon's book does little to explain "manhood" to the rest of us amateurs, it was still a great read. Even though he comes off as far more of a superdad than I suspect he actually is, his honest acknowledgment of his flaws in the other areas of his life give the book a groundedness that makes it both accessible and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      It was a great pleasure to read this book. There were such a lot of déjà vu for me. All those funny little experiences with own children which I've remembered could be really identically to the authors one. The only differences are that in my country children are still able to play out in the neighbourhood without any parental survey as well the cycling on the roads is still possible here. It was a marvellous and humorously reading.
    • 5/5
      Most of these short essays were written for Details, a men's clothing and lifestyle magazine. That audience allows Chabon terrific range -- in a single paragraph he can roam back and forth from coarse to erudite. Reading these essays is like sitting at ease with a guy who is a close enough friend to be emotionally open, in an environment sufficiently informal that he can say exactly what he means, without circumlocutions or euphemisms. But of course they're essays, so that mood is the product not of actual intimacy, but of skilled and careful writing, however effortless it seems. Shining through all the essays is Chabon's astoundingly precise word choice, which lets the meaning of a paragraph - or an entire essay - pivot on a single phrase. An example of that precision is the book's title, which sounds self-deprecating at first take, but in light of the penultimate essay ('The Amateur Family'), has a different, much richer significance: "The closest I have ever come [to defining the kind of people I have raised my children to be] is amateur, in all the original best senses of the word: a lover, a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it -- to explore the imaginary world - oneself."The essays in the collection I found most moving include 'The Hand on My Shoulder', about Chabon's relationship with the father of his ex-wife; 'The Heartbreak Kid', which knits together mirth and self-inflicted suffering; 'A Woman of Valor', in praise of Chabon's wife; 'Xmas', a Jewish take on Christmas; and 'Daughter of the Commandment', on time and family, and which brought a lump to my throat, not that I'm particularly sentimental.
    • 3/5
      fun and thoughtful