Understanding Men's Passages:
  Discovering the New Map of Men's Lives
   Gail Sheehy
  1998 Random House NY USA
   ISBN: 0679452737


Given their increasingly unpredictable & elongated lives, men need to reinvent themselves & expand the ways they demonstrate their manliness. How do you make change work for you? Where can you find new passion & purpose? What keeps a man young?

Gail Sheehy writes from her experience within her own marriage & watching her husband struggle into & out of his mid-life loss of passion & later, listening for hours to men speaking about their changing lives.

This respected author, journalist & researcher listened to hundreds of men speaking about the pressures they feel to remain youthful with perpetual virility; about competing with younger professionals, many of them women; about the fear of loss of the passion that defines them - their work.

Here are confidences from both celebrities & everyday heroes, creating a mirror in which every man can locate his possibilities for growth & change in his stagnating life. Gail Sheehy's journalism skills lets these bold, feisty & imaginative men recount their discovery of what has been missing in their middle years & how they forged new directions in the second half of their lives.

Composed in six parts with chapter headings like: It's A Guy Thing; Why Do I Still Feel Like A Kid?; Manhood on Trial; Married and Mortal; Passage to Your Second Adulthood; Redirect Your Life Before the Hammer Falls; Love and War With Wives, Fathers, Children; Who's Afraid of Male Menopause?, Understanding Men's Passages is a fast, readable & eminently interesting journey into the maw of men's rites of passages in this century, in this society.

Interspersed with text are banners declaring succinct sayings about health attacks waiting to happen; spiritual hunger; competition & wisdom. Statistics about life expectancy, earning power, age related pressures & love relationships are also liberally sprinkled.

As with Gail Sheehy's influential Passages her latest is a resounding adventure into the labyrinth of our lives, public & private, child & parent, lover & friend.

There are Appendices on careers, couples, virility, integrity & depression with quick questions to ask yourself & warning signs to look for. Added are available Resources, immediate exercises & strategies. A Bibliography & Index complete this very useful section of tools.

I do encourage people of both genders to give Understanding Men's Passages a go, take your time - this is not fast food - more like a menu for a month of hearty, healthy fodder for your grey cells.

Enjoy, learn & love. I recommend this book.

Also by Gail Sheehy: Lovesounds; Speed is of the Essence; Panthermania; Hustling; Passages; Pathfinders; Spirit of Survival; Character: America's Search for Leadership; Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World; The Silent Passage; New Passages & Hillary's Choice
(05/28/00)

Rebecca