Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

I'm actually writing this first version of my review while still reading the book. Not all ideas Sam Keen conveys are original but the presentation as a whole has been somewhat of an empiphany for me. That is to say, it has given me jarringly lucid insight into who I am as a male and the very predictable patterns I, and many other men fall into. While reading the first five chapters, I was struck at how well I was described. I am glad Sam Keen had the courage to write on such a controversial yet worthy topic. All men need to read this book and reflect on their female relationships: mother, partner, children, co-workers and friends alike. I'm not yet sure that simply the awareness of my male tendancies relative to WOMAN will be a solution to faulty relating, but it is certainly a start. Understanding and acting in a less "programmed" manner would be a worthy goal for men who read this book. Keen's acknowledgement that although we are all human beings, we are profoundly different in our historical roles, cultural roles, socialization, and (naturally) in our physiology, is a simple yet profound truth that needs to be carried in the front our awareness while interacting with the opposite sex. This is a vital book for men (and women too) in this age of painful gender division and misunderstanding.

What tells us we are men? Is it how we look on the outside? Is it the way we behave? Unfortunately, if you are looking for these questions, you might as well go away now, for this book is not meant to be read by ideologues who think they need an idea to know.We have all tread the mass of upgrades to our lives called "women," hopping from one to the next without fulfillment. Some of us have also played the nice guy/poindexter role into night and day until our wallets broke and then we were left without anything. We have tried to be male in so many different ways, but there is one that outshines them all. It is the one that lies above the grave of impossibility.In his excellent and thorough essay, Keen urges us at the end of the first chapter not to skirt through the book but to read carefully each passage. We've been stranded for too long on a desolate island, asking for attention. Our hearts and minds have been callously stupefied by our advances, and by our society and time, which have been of no help to us at all. Being manly doesn't mean we necessarily have to exaggerate our strength in order to *look* like a man. Instead, the prayer is that we might express something greater within ourselves and not be afraid of how manly we look to others.One of the first things we must do, Sam says, is to challenge our misconceptions about WOMAN. This is "WOMAN" with all caps. She's the undying witch who comes to scare us, night after night, after we have fallen asleep. The little boy who fears the witch is still there has not left us, for we have not gotten over our very private concerns about who She is.The quintessential journey into the heart, for a man, starts at the place where he begins to accept the uncertainty of his maleness. Beyond this, he has always an abundance of tools and source material to solve his ordinary problems in everyday ways, and if he can play up to the mastery of this experience he will eventually become a man. In chapter ten, Keen writes about this, telling us a quote by Martin Luther: "Our good is hidden, and so profoundly that it is hidden under its opposite. Thus our life is under death, love of ourselves under hate of ourselves, glory under ignominy, salvation under perdition, justice under sin, strength under infirmity, and universally every one of our affirmations under its negation."Indeed, our strength does come from its opposite.If we are to escape past the predicaments that have held us in and reveal the secret knots that we have tied, not only for ourselves, but for our love of the world, then we must undertake the questor's journey into the root of the darkness. Are we men or are we not? Read on...

I read this book a few years back and I am in debt to its wisdom. It fact Sam Keen may also be indebt to me as I have given this book away as a gift at least a dozen times.Keen looks at the changing role of men in society in this book. Men were the bread winners in families because that was the way it was supposed to be. With women expected to work, the male role has changed. All of the sudden, men(particularly the white male) has been blamed for many of the ills of society.Keen explores where a man can find fulfillment in this modern world through roles in work, family, and sex. If you have ever asked yourself the question, "What makes a man, a real man?", this book will help to answer the question. No man should be without this book.

I was told about this book in both a psychology class and in a Communication Between the Genders class, college classes composed mostly of women. During the semester, I was taken aback by my female classmates' intense, even brutal, anger at men and how that anger motivated their attitudes and behaviors. These women had little or no desire to discover ways to neutralize the tensions in the male-female combat zone, but preferred to blame their failings and frustrations on men. Post-divorce, I was not without my own anger, but I could pretty much well identify its causes. Their anger, I noticed, seemed driven by forces they could neither identify nor define. These observations compelled me to find honest answers. I wanted to understand, as objectively as possible, what had created the devastating rift between men and women, beyond the pat explanations espoused by the second wave of the Feminist Movement and the mass media. Sam Keen's book shed much light on the problem with the simple observation that men suffer, and are in these dire straits, because they have not freed themselves from their psychological and emotional bondage to women; they can never define themselves as separate beings so long as they "invest so much of their identity" in women. I am grateful to Keen for providing me this profound understanding and the experience of feeling true empathy for men. Just the same, as long as men choose to remain bonded in these ways to women, and so long as women [and for selfish gains, I might add] proudly wield the power they know they hold over men, no amount of empathy can change the status quo.

This book is for men who have experienced their emptiness, loneliness, and longing for connection, but whose ways of dealing with these issues are limited by old paradigms and beliefs which could change if exposed to new information. This book, a real treasure, contains much of this new information. I highly, highly recommend it.