Manhood in the Making

Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity
272 pages
© David Gilmore 1991

What is it to “be a man”?  Manhood in the Making  reviews various ethnographic studies that focused on sex and gender roles, throughout the world.  In it, the author argues that despite the general variety of specific male roles, there’s enough overlapping expectations that a ubiquitous – if not universal – vision of man emerges. Common to all is the belief that Manhood is earned,  not assumed.   Preindustrial – that is, traditional – cultures prescribed rituals to graduate mere young males into the canon of Men,  and these rites were not mere words spoken with gravity. Rites of passage often demanded trials in the wilderness, or trials of pain administered by their elders. Strength was demanded: strength in body, strength in character. Strength in character manifests itself slightly differently based on the culture, but a commonality is the ability to endure pain and hardship.  This stoicism does not extend to social interactions, as perceived insults are responded to forcefully. Aggression,  both against one's fellows and against women -- by trying to seduce them --  is a given. Even in societies that were not militaristic, like agricultural tribes, men were still expected and required to be active -- to spend their leisure time in the public sphere, competing with other men.

  In some societies, to be a Man was not a permanent achievement, but a temporary status that could be imperiled by shirking. The most common image here is of one as man the warrior -- defining and enforcing borders,  risking his life to procure food in the wild or resources from other tribes.  The author's conclusions are drawn from a survey of global cultures: around the Mediterranean, several spots in Africa, India, Japan, China, South America, and various islands.  The author notes that some island cultures are outliers, with no perceptible gender roles; these societies also seem to lack strong perceptions of personal boundaries or property, freely allowing visitors to roam their houses and flirt with their partners.   The author doesn't speculate whether this is purely cultural on their part, but an interesting comparison may be drawn from another isolated group of social primates, the bonobos: they, too, are not nearly as aggressive as their chimpanzee cousins across the river.  Gilmore pans evolutionary/biological  explanations in general, favoring a Freudian interpretation that all society is role-playing, and that the role of the aggressive Leader is one most pre-industrial societies promote for their men. 

Although there's not a strong evolutionary psychology component, the survey in general indicates that manliness is not a cultural veneer that can be scraped off or dispatched, but an elemental part of the male character.  I appreciated the connections Gilmore drew to gang cultures and traditional male behavior, as well as the ambiguity he pointed out as far as manly character goes. For instance, while many societies measure men by how much alcohol they can consume without falling over,  or by how many women they can pursue, other moral cultures abstain from alcohol and restrict sexuality to the pair-bond.  As  the technological mass state continues to develop,  this authentic if volatile part of being human remains, and will go increasingly against the grain.


Related:
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham

The Unvanquished

The Unvanquished
© 1938 William Faulkner
254 pages

Years ago in a ninth-grade literature class,  I chose to read a book by William Faulkner for a class project on the basis that he was a southern writer. My teacher cautioned me against trying The Sound and the Fury, warning me that it was difficult -- a challenge out of  scale for a minor paper. Well, dear readers, I persisted -- for about a chapter. Then, faced with Faulkner's bewildering narrative style --,a torrent of words with few  marks of punctuation, flowing ceaslessly like the Mississippi --  I returned to my teacher with tail between my legs and asked for something else, and thus read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time. Ever since then, the memory of Faulkner has haunted me.  I associate his writing with both brain-melting difficulty and with embarrassment, and yet...still I've wanted to read him. The prevailing reason is the same:   William Faulkner is a southern writer. He is not just a southern writer, though,  he's one of The Southern Writers, always mentioned with Flannery O'Connor as though the two were manufactured as a set, like a pair of pants.

The Unvanquished is the story of a young boy (Bayard Sartoris) who comes of age amid the Civil War and reconstruction, along with his close friend Marengo ("Ringo").  Ringo begins the novel as a slave, but the narrator mentions early on that he and Bayard were so close in age that they suckled at the same breast, and both lived in  dread awe of The Colonel and Granny.  While The Colonel (John Sartoris) is off at war, fighting to keep the damyanks out of Vicksburg,  Granny is the boss.  Actually, I almost suspect she remains the boss when The Colonel is home, for this is a woman who trucks into the middle of a warzone to demand the Yankees return her stolen mules, her slaves, and her chest of silver.  Fearless, she uses fabricated requisition papers to steal and sell livestock to the invading army -- not growing rich, but using the proceeds to support her community of Jefferson, burnt-out by the war.   Shady business brings forth shadier persons, though, and soon death visits the Sartoris family. In the collection's conclusion, young Bayard -- who is now a twenty-something law student -- must confront the man who robbed him of his father  upholding the family's honor but heedful of the consequences should he make the wrong choice.

If you have never read Faulkner, The Unvanquished is a promising work  to test the waters,  It's one of his shorter pieces, and the stories' length allow an unfamiliar reader to dive into Faulkner without chance of drowning.  That style of writing, the torrent of consciousness ("stream" won't do for Faulkner), is present here, but not nearly as overwhelming as I remembered from Sound and Fury.   Although these stories are filled with death, as the State's armies lay waste to the South,  Granny's confrontations with the Yank officers always have humor about them, as the officers regard her with astonished admiration. One of them thanks God that Jefferson David never thought to draft an army of grannies and orphans, for a regiment of Sartorises would be the Union's undoing.

(Bayard and Ringo, Spanish cover)

Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
© 2017 Anthony Esolen
256 pages

Some things, like a Roman bridge, can last for millennia through the virtue of their design, the simplicity of their use, and the inherent strength of their materials. Other things, like the Golden Gate Bridge,  or a house, require more steady attention. It isn't that they're built in an inferior fashion, but they are far more complicated and ambitious.  A culture is a thing that requires attention; it must be renewed generation to generation. In Out of the Ashes,  Anthony Esolen calls attention of Americans to the fact that western culture  is past need for attention: it has sat too long exposed to the elements without refreshing layers of paint, the termites and mice of base creation have withered away its walls and support posts, and the foundation has sunk and cracked. What is needed is rebuilding and restoration. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something, and here Esolen offers hearty arguments for resurrecting education, play, a society based on marriage, family, and the home, politics reoriented towards the local, and the veneration of beauty and virtue. In short, he bids us deny the unholy trinity of Self, Sex, and the State, and  to become participants in our own lives once more.

In interviews and lectures Esolen maintains that what  we must realize about American culture is that there isn't a culture there at all, merely memories and leftover habits. It is as we are walking through a dry creekbed; the impression of the creek is still there upon the land, even as the water itself is a far-distant trickle.  The role of culture in Esolen's sense isn't the mere transmission of music and games from generation to generation, with improvisation and growth along the way. Instead, culture is more broadly applied to civil institutions supporting a common appreciation of man and the cosmos, supporting human life -- the cultivation of man as it were, the garden in which we are watered, thrive, and  create anew the next generation.  Society formerly relied on the  subtle, consistent, and constant pressure of civil society -- of places like the home, the church, and the school. These were all institutions which people not only participated in, they were in complete control of them.   These institutions not only shared a common architectural language, in that schoolhouses, homes, and village churches might look like, but they shared a common mission in promoting human welfare.  That mission was also shared by social organization (the organization of dances to allow young people to meet one another, for instance) and ordinary habit, like allowing children to run outside and play unattended.   In 2001, Robert Putnam decried the decline of civil institutions -- churches, civic groups, bowling clubs, local political moments -- and attempted to figure out what caused their decline. Now the fall is complete:  state schools are such failures that colleges must teach remedial English (prior to their English Literature courses on Twilight and Fifty Shades, Dickens and Stoker having been dumped);   young adults raised in the hookup miasma have no socialization in creating a bonafide  soul-speaks-to-soul relationship,  and every romantic encounter must be  carefully navigated lest someone be sued because the old culture what ensured everyone knew what was appropriate and what was not is lost.

There is no use complaining; we can only rebuild, and the place to start is the family.  Esolen emphatically rejects the modern primacy of the individual, maintaining the family is the foundation of every human society. The home and family are where children are created, nurtured, and taught to become authentic members of their society, their polis.   Speaking of the polis, it too needs awakening:   the State has taken away every prerogative of local communities, leaving them a few pittances like garbage pickup. This is wrong in that it takes away from people the ability to be effective citizens of their community.  Citizenship in the national government means nothing; the individual is grist in the mill.  Yet there is little point in running for something like the school board nowadays, because the decisions have already been decided by far-distant strangers who know better than people what and how to teach their children.   Esolen thus encourages people to create alternative institutions, to  homeschool their children and work together to create private colleges in response to the past-pathetic state of university education today, a place that provides safe spaces and coloring books to its wards instead of teaching them to grapple, body and soul, with adversity and ignorance.   Yet helping to participate in the restoration of society isn't as formidable as creating new and virile sources of education like St. John's and Christendom College;   it can be as simple as learning to appreciate the poetic beauty of traditional hymns,  so much more potent than the happy-clappy praisesongs favored by megachurches -- or leaving the television behind to use one's leisure time to build something with their hands.   Fight ugliness with beauty, lies with truth, decay with work. Participation is the thing -- walking one's neighborhood and picking up litter is more effective than parading about D.C. dressed up as a vagina.

Esolen's concerns are not necessarily exclusive to Christians;  the Swedish eudaimonic philosopher Alain de Botton, for instance,  has written extensively on the role of art, literature, and architecture in human flourishing,  seeing them as important as philosophy in allowing human beings to grow to fulness.  Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman are both emphatic voices for subsidiarity,  but rarely refer to religion.  Robert Putnam also delivered the essential book on civil culture's decline in his Bowling Alone, which was not religious in the least.  Nevertheless, Esolen is indisputably writing primarily to Christians,  because the west’s civil culture has been Christian, and he is  inspired and rooted by the Catholic social doctrine, referring to papal encyclical at times. At the end Esolen doubles down that he is writing a defense of Christian civilization.   As he urges readers to devote themselves once more to truth and beauty amid the constant babble-babble of lies coming from politicians, the news, and , the amazon of banality that is social media, he bids them to realize that truth remains treason in the empire of lies, and that  ultimately, we pursue the good and true because it is Good, not to create a heaven on Earth. That can never be, for all Christians are ultimately pilgrims on a journey to another world.

Esolen -- whom I've heard described as a "fun Jeremiah" --  is a joy to listen to and to read, a man of passion with a deep bench of literary references. In a lecture on the decline of culture, for instance,  he once used an obscure play by Ben Johnson to make his point. In an interview, someone off-handedly mentions a hymn -- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" -- and Esolen recognizes it, seizes on it with joy, and at once begins lovingly reciting it.  He is capable of slinging barbs as his foes, but animosity is largely absent here. Instead he writes here in a mood of intense concern, driven on by hope in redemption.   For those who  look at the American landscape -- all the lonely people, the dehumanizing stretches of asphalt and smoke, the constant presence of the foul beast of Jabba the State, who forever demands attention and obedience -- this is a handbook to what went wrong, and a bracing cup to cheer to begin the work of restoring a more humane culture.

Related:
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam

Podcast of the Week: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Great War

This week I'm highlighting #272 of the Art of Manliness podcast, an interview with the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.  This book examines C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's role in the Great War and delves into ways that civilization catastrophe shaped the minds and the writing of these two much-loved authors.

The Art of Manliness podcast is another heavy favorite of mine, largely because its author has such an excellent, well-seasoned conception of manhood.  Brett McKay doesn't write articles on being a pickup artist or an alpha-male athlete.  His perception of masculinity is deeply inspired by the Greco-Roman concept of manly virtue; that is, character and masculinity were deeply mixed. Much of his writing concerns not only being good at being male --  learning skills, taking on challenges -- but being a good man, a good husband, a well-informed citizen who can learn, communicate, and work well with others.   He also interviews authors frequently;  professionals, scientists, physicians, soldiers, etc,    In addition to sharing scientific studies, literary criticism, etc. McKay also has sections on grooming and style.

A few samples:
Honor, Courage, Thumos, and Plato's Idea of Manliness
How to Deal with Aggressive People
The Classical Education You Never Had
Harnessing Behavioral Psychology for a Rich Life
The Manliness of Jack London
Level Up Your Life with Nerd Fitness



McKay has been the source of a few reads here, including The Thin Man last year.

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies
© 1954 William Golding
156 pages

A group of boys marooned on a tiny Pacific Island must work together, battling the elements and one another. If they don't adapt, they'll be voted off the island -- or thrown off.   It's not Survivor, it's Lord of the Flies.  You know the story, of course.  A plane crash dumps a score or so of boys onto an island,  an attempt at restoring civilized order is made, but it falls apart in tribalism and bloodshed.  In taking a group of creme de la creme school children, some of them literally choir boys, and placing them in an idyllic setting that leads only to chaos and death, Golding offers not an adventure story but a reflection human nature.

The island not only abounds in food, but is predator-free. Coconuts, fresh water, and timber for making shelter are everywhere for the taking. Despite this, the boys become increasingly psychologically stressed, a plight made worse by the ambitions of one to become the next Chief.  This idyllic bloodshed directly repudiates the myth of the noble savage, though, maintaining that there is something dark and irrational within man that will devour society from within if it is not tamed.  Yet there is something irrational outside in this story, something that makes it a near-fantasy, because the boys are haunted by some Beast that attacks from the sea, from the trees, from the air. It's not simply a parachuted corpse they dread; at one point the Beast directly taunts one of the boys, and another time they enact murder under some sort of a mass delusion that one of their number is the Beast.  What keeps the boys together as long as they were is the proud memory of being English, and therefore devoted to good order and setting things aright.   The intelligent thing to do, maintains their leader Ralph, is to maintain a signal fire -- but the fun thing to do, the thing that enchants the senses and drives the boys to madness, is putting on war-paint and hunting pigs. The madness and chant of the hunt will so consume the boys that murder joins them on the island, though they are saved from destruction by Her Majesty's Ship, the Deus ex Machina.

This is a grim little story, of course, but a welcome rebuttal to those who today believe everything would be peachy-keen if it weren't for this politician or that program or lack thereof.  The 'beast' isn't so mild that it can be drawn out of the sea with a hook.

Demonic Males

Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
© 1996 Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham
350 pages

Why is the world run by violent men?  Demonic Males  argues that human males are by violent by nature,  a trait we share with other primates, and that this aggressive behavior is sustained through sexual selection.   Males are not uniquely violent, nor is our inherited penchant for bloodshed  inescapable,  but we can only begin to look for remedies by understanding the scope of the problem.  To combat violence is to war against human nature itself.

Contrary to popular opinion, human beings are not the only creatures who wage war against ourselves. Demonic Males opens an account of a band of chimpanzees moving through the forest as though on a hunt, only to choose at their target an isolated member of a neighboring band of chimps.  After a gruesome ambush  that left the target dead, the war-band then retreated into its own territory – its sole accomplishment having been the deliberate murder of a neighbor.   The authors follow up with many other such field reports, from Africa to Asia, spanning the primates, and find casual and ‘political’ violence in each class of the great apes, and from this argue that the domination of the planet by aggressive men owes not to a vast culture of patriarchy, but to the desperate straits our ancestors came of age in.

Small orangutans chase down unwilling females and force them to copulate,  chimpanzees brutally attack one another when vying for power, and even the mostly-peaceful gorillas practice infanticide.  In every primate species, it’s the men doing all of this fighting – and fighting with tooth and claw.  Do humans seem like improbable creatures of war? We have no tusks, no claws, no powerful tails.  Our methods of carnage are simply different:  human males specialize in fisticuffs, common to long-limbed apes.   The authors’ research indicates that the difference between highly aggressive species like humans and chimpanzees, and the more peaceable groups, lay in the social dynamics of food sourcing. the gorillas and bonobos observed  had ranges that allowed for large, stable troops, while the chimpanzees had to roam for food in much smaller bands fighting for survival. The woodland fringe where humans first appeared would have relegated us to that raiding behavior as well. The authors draw parallels between chimpanzee warfare and the small band raiding observed historically across the world, and lingering today in the depths of South America and the streets of Los Angeles.

Though violent behavior is regarded as self-defeating in the modern world, at the primeval level it serves certain purposes.   The story begins with food, but eventually circles back to sexual selection. The small variant of orangutan males could never challenge large males for mating opportunities, so they seize them. A silverback gorilla  has the responsibility for protecting every female and their young in his troop;  like a lion, he has little interest in safeguarding some other gorilla's progeny. For chimpanzees, beating their fellows into submission is just as effective as bribing them with food.   Females are involved in the continuation of aggression, too, sometimes against their will (in the case of rape) and sometimes complicitly, as when they throng a rising star, eager for his protection against the other aggressors.

Though the argument of Demonic Males is that humans are fundamentally aggressive,  the authors demonstrate that there are alternatives.  Chimpanzees, for instance, have cousins across the river who are very different:  isolated from competition and with an abundance of food, aggression has withered, and large alliances of females rein in throwbacks.    While human nature has a violence cast now, in the future, the sustained institutional suppression of violence might allow us to grow away from ours as well.  

Demonic Males covers a lot of territory --  dismantling the myth of the noble savage, weighing anthropologists and primatologists' field reports against one another -- and presents a serious challenge to those who those who believe that man can simply be 'retrained' in the matter of the New Soviet Man.  Frans de Waal's own extensive experience observing chimpanzees is not nearly as pessmetic; in Chimpanzee Politics, for instance, he argued that despite surges of violence against political rivals in high-stakes situations, most of the time the daunting strength of males is not unleashed, the contenders pulling their punches.  The gorillas' practice of infanticide, so similar to that of lions,  indicates it is not a recent, primate-specific tactic.  The authors did draw on a much broader range of activity,  however, so this certainly merits consideration.


Related:
Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner
© 2003 Khaled Hosseini
400 pages

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The Kite Runner is a stirring story of betrayal and redemption set in Afghanistan as the country is destroyed through revolution, war, and the takeover by Taliban militias.  The novel rests on the relationship between Amir and Hassan, two young boys growing up together in the same household -- but separated by class.  Although theirs is a brotherly friendship, it is put to the test by intense social pressure, Amir's own fears, and the outbreak of war.  As the novel progresses, emotional and physical distance grows between the boys;  Amir, burdened by the shame of not defending his friend as he should when horror lashes out, pushes Hassan away, and eventually Amir and his father emigrate to the United States to flee the destruction of Afghanistan.  Fifteen+ years later, however, when Amir's father dies, he is called back to Afghanistan to visit an ailing friend of the family, There, in the rubble of his hometown, he must find the courage to atone for the selfishness and cowardice of youth. Once he hid before bullies and allowed others to be beaten for his sake; now he steals into the center of Taliban power to beard the lions in their den and rescue an innocent child.  The endgame has the kind of poetic justice found only in fiction,  with the same monster who tormented Amir and Hassan when they were all boys returning as the chief Talib. However improbable it is in real life, it succeeds wonderfully as a story, delivering the full impact of how Amir has changed since leaving Afghanistan. Few people get to fight their childhood memories so directly, and  it's utterly satisfying -- not the dispatch of the villain, but Amir's trial by fire. For most of the book, he is a weak character who shies away from responsibility, and  the ending chapters are a gauntlet that makes him honorable.  Although most of the book is tragic, such is made good by the finale.

Pedal to the Metal

Petal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers
© 1994 Lawrence Ouelett
247 pages

ICC is a-checkin' on down the line
I'm a little overweight, and my logbook's way behind

But nothin' bothers me tonight, I can dodge all the scales all right

Six days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight. 
("Six Days on the Road", Dave Dudley)


Whatever images spring to mind at the mention of “sociology professor”, that of a long-haired truck driver probably isn’t one of them. Yet Lawrence Ouellet was, before becoming an academic,  a genuine working man – a soldier, a telephone lineman, and most notably a trucker. In Pedal to the Metal, two of his dissimilar passions meet. Drawing on his experience at three different small contractors, and referencing a range of social theorists including Thorstein Veblen,   the book not only delivers a sense of what it is like to be truck driver, but explores the truckers’ motives in connection with deeper economic principles.  Ouellet takes readers on a ridealong at each subject company, sharing both his and his coworkers’ experiences and thoughts about their work, detailing  the job’s particularities.

 The book develops toward a section on the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic awards, with Ouellet concluding that different aspects of the work appeal to different men. Those who are merely workers – men who exchange their time for money and take little pleasure in the job itself –  don’t mind routine and value jobs mostly for comfortable pay.   On the other end of the scale are ‘super truckers’ who are primarily attracted to the job because of mythic appeal; they enjoy playing the part of the outlaw, the rugged man who dominates a vast machine and spends his days trekking across the country,  tackling mountains and evading the law.  These men prefer to work at companies where destinations are highly variable, allowing for constant challenges that demand the best rigs money can buy – and who often express their pride in what they do by sinking their own money into customizing trucks further.   Ouellet sees most truck drivers as being attracted to the work because of its mystique, though over time they drift toward the conventional because of the demands of family. No young father wants his glimpses of his children to be limited to once-a-month layovers.  Trucking as a lifestyle defies the tendencies of capitalisim (in the author’s view) to reduce men to mere economic units.It’s a criticism shared in spirit by Wendell Berry, who scorns ‘employees’ – men with no real connection to the work beyond pay. Ouelett’s is certainly no mere prole, for near the book’s end he recounts the pains and glories of trucking with passion that makes plain his genuine love for it.

Pedal to the Metal has much to recommend it for anyone remotely interested in trucking, both as a career choice and as one of the most important elements of all economies regardless of scale.  It certainly has no rival in giving readers both insight into the everyday work, coupled with a study of sociological probing into the values of the men attracted to it. Its only real disadvantage is its publication date; based on research done in the 1970s and 1980s,  modern truckers work under far more technological scrutiny and regulatory restraint. Men who pride themselves on taking a load of petroleum up and down mountains without incident, who through experience gain the wisdom to choose superior routes, are now reduced to being monitored constantly, their location and speed within a search query’s tap by the home office.  The men in this study who despised the notion of being company men, of allowing the boss to get the better of them, would no doubt chafe under the constant eye of conditions today -. Trucking may yet one day be the sole domain of “company men”, shuttling back and forth on preset routes, and taking little pleasure from operating under the steady LED eyes of the machine. If nothing else, Pedal  will bring back to mind the days when truckers were truly cowboys of the highway.

The Chosen

The Chosen
© 1967 Chaim Potok
288 pages

Danny and Reuven are two Orthodox Jewish boys who take one thing very seriously: baseball.  When their rival schools meet on the baseball diamond, religious passion turns play to war, and an accident hospitalizes Reuven. Thus is born an unexpected friendship, one that matures throughout their adolescence.  The two come of age in a difficult era; the book begins in World War 2, and takes them through the discovery of the Holocaust, and the turmoil that surrounded Israel's creation. Making matters still more interesting is the boys' religious identities and their respective desires:  Danny is a Hasidic Jew being groomed to succeed his father, while Reuven's dad is a somewhat more secular professor.  Both boys are intellectually-oriented themselves, serious students of both their tradition and respective interests:  one is fascinated by logic, the other by Freud.  Their passion frequently causes them to bump heads with one another, and not necessarily over religious matters. Reuven's rationalism threatens not Danny's religion, but his passion of Freudian psychology.  Their most serious break has nothing to do with either of them, but with their fathers' respective politics: the professor is a passionate supporter of the nascent Israeli state, while the rabbi believes an Israel led by secular Jews is an obscenity, utter anathema to any devout follower of Torah.  This is mid-20th century America, a place utterly recognizable...but many of the characters live within a culture that is utterly exotic to the American mainstream, and The Chosen is simultaneously the story of boys becoming men and an education in Hasidic Judaism. There are five principle characters in this novel: the boys, their fathers, and the Talmud. Thousands of years of Jewish practice and biblical commentary are contained in its various volumes, and its demands and wisdom both guide our characters and fill their lives with reverent dread.  The Chosen is utterly fascinating with a strong redemptive finish.

The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers

The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers
© 2000 Daniel Wolf
372 pages

Ever wonder what  it's like to ride with a biker gang? They held a certain fascination for Daniel Wolf, who decided to turn a local gang into an anthropological study.  The idea of an outlaw biker gang allowing an college student to hang around them, let alone record their actions during a three-year study, is apparently not as dangerous as you would think. Perhaps there's something special about Canadian gangs, or the Rebels in particular, for one of their members listed his occupation as an IBM Technician/Bouncer. A world where computer geeks double as bar muscle is surely worth getting to know. Unlike other exposes of outlaw biking (Under and Alone, say),  The Rebels isn't out to point the finger at bikers and take them down for their dastardly deeps. For an 'outlaw' biker gang, the Rebels here seem oddly peaceable; though professedly devoted to living beyond the pale, their crimes seem limited to bar brawls and smoking marijuana.  Wolf writes out of curiosity and genuine interest, not condemnation; he wants to know why this subculture holds the attraction for the men it does, and how it works. Although various chapters examine practical aspects of club life, in essence this is a book about relationships, of men relating to one another and the world at large. Wolf sees the gang as the members' way of creating a meaningful tribe in a world shot through with alienation. Although these groups define themselves by their lawless, internally they're quite cohesive, bound by club charters that control their behavior for the good of the unit as a whole. The Rebels, for instance, are forbidden from using hard drugs that would draw unwanted heat on the group, and made to keep their motorbikes in working order and in use for most of the riding season.  (Not biking results in fines and eventually expulsion.)   The brotherhood becomes a tribe unto itself, the polity that \claims most of the bikers' innate clannish instincts. The loyalties of square civilians are infinitely divided, except in times of war; we are attached to abstract notions of states and provinces, as well as numerous institutions like our bar buddies, Rotary clubs,  and church. For the rebels, abstracts fall away:  effectively isolated from mainstream society by their embrace of the 'outlaw' ethos,  the gang is allowed to become The Tribe. The most successful clubs, Wolf notes, are those that restrict themselves to under thirty members; beyond that, the men's ability to be significant actors within the clan is diminished.   At the heart of the Rebels is an itch to be plugged in fully to life, to be engaged with it, not pacing like a caged rat;  their greatest compliment is that a brother is 'righteous',  completely genuine.  Although dated by this point (the research was done in the early 1990s, and the Rebels have seen been absorbed by larger gangs), The Rebels is a standout -- not as an inquiry into criminal organizations, but as a study of what tribal man yearns for and will insist on building even if it denied him.



Related:
Under and Alone, William Queen

Where the Red Fern Grows

Where the Red Fern Grows
© 1961 Wilson Rawls
245 pages

“I suppose there's a time in practically every young boy's life when he's affected by that wonderful disease of puppy love. I don't mean the kind a boy has for the pretty little girl that lives down the road. I mean the real kind, the kind that has four small feet and a wiggly tail, and sharp little teeth that can gnaw on a boy's finger; the kind a boy can romp and play with, even eat and sleep with.”

Few books bring back memories of boyhood as swiftly as Where the Red Fern Grows. I can still remember my third grade teacher beginning to read this out loud, and my having chills as soon as the narration opened on an older man rescuing a tired hound dog and fingering a trophy on the mantle, thinking of two dogs he had loved fiercely as a child.   Where the Red Fern Grows is a classic story of a boy’s yearning for puppies, and the adventures taken on once such friends were found.

 Billy Coleman, the narrator, is a remarkable boy:  raised in the wooded foothills of the Ozarks, a hunter and trapper from the day he could walk, he wants nothing more than a faithful hound at his side.  The price of a hound bred for hunting matches that of a mule, though, and is beyond his family’s means. Undaunted,  Billy earns money  hunting crawdads, picking blackberries, and selling small furs until he has the funds – and then, when there is delay about sending off for the puppies, takes off into the wilderness and advances into the big city of Tahlequah to take delivery of them personally.   Training them personally, teaching them every trick he’s heard of and witnessed in his long hours watching and trapping on his own,  he and they become an inseparable trio, utterly devoted to one another. When the hounds Big Dan and Little Anne tree their first raccoon, Billy keeps his promise to them  to ‘take care of the rest’ by laboring several days and nights at the tree, hatcheting away, and when his strength fails he prays for more.  The dark nights and fast-moving creeks of the Ozarks provide danger aplenty, but they whether it together, even becoming regional champions of coonhunting. Every story has its ending, though, every childhood must end, and so does Billy’s in a violent altercation with a mountain lion. Billy himself survives, but his remembers the losses.

 Where the Red Fern Grows has a brutal ending, especially for young boys who, like me, doted on their own dogs, and felt the desperate pain of separation from them when life’s twists and turns made it so.  Reading now as an adult, I expect the ending, and so it is not quite gut-wrenching. Rather, like the narrator, the ending frames all of the fond memories that unfold in the story that is told before, putting them into focus. I only read this book once or twice in my youth, during the early 90s, but its scenes have buried themselves in my brain. For me this was a visit with an old friend, whose face I have not seen in decades, but not forgotten a line of.   The boy is everything a boy could hope to be -- courageous, intelligent, and beloved, with a pair of friends and a family who cannot be bettered.  This is a book filled with love and adventure, and often the two are intertwined to great effect.  It's also a look back at an America with a frontier, where civilization is contained within scattered sanctuaries and the woods filled with danger and excitement. There are few stories that can be more enticing for a young reader, especially boys!  

Related:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
• Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter,  Stephen Rinella

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
© 1876 Mark Twain
202 pages

            There is truly no better time to revisit The Adventures of Tom Sawyer than the summer, with its long, languid days bringing back memories of childhood liberty from school, and the mischievous episodes used  to fill them.  Tom Sawyer is the history of a boy, told by an aging boy – Mark Twain – whose own fond recollections of boyhood are obvious.  Tom is the quintessential boy;  wild, clever,  with a head full of adventures. The importance of memorizing  Bible verses may be lost on him, as is the value of whitewashing a fence – but he is not dull or lazy. How could he be when he spends days hard at work digging for treasure, or playing out The Tale of Robin Hood with his friends, delivering dialogue word-for-word from the book by memory?  Tom may struggle at being civilized,  but he has his own values to live up to. For all his youthful mischief, Tom is hard at play, practicing to be a man; he yearns to be the adventurous pirate, the gallant knight winning the favor of his lady love. In Tom’s case, such practice is fruitful, for his pursuit of pretend adventure will lead him headlong into actual danger when he and his friend Huck  witness a murder. In the months that follow, Tom must live up to the nobility he practiced to truly rescue damsels in distress, to truly defeat a dastardly villain, and win the prize for all his derring-do – genuine pirate treasure!  Could there be a better book for boys?