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Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America
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Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America
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by Geoffrey Canada
Sales Rank : 27709
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Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press; 1 edition December 10, 1998
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807023175
ISBN-13: 978-0807023174
Product Dimensions:
8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
From Library Journal
The president and CEO of the Rheedlen Centers for Children Families, an award-winning child-advocacy agency, Canada (Fist Stick Knife Gun, LJ 5/15/95) grew up on tough South Bronx streets, where he witnessed friends dying by the handful. Recounting his childhood at midlife, he powerfully depicts what children face in today's world, especially the crippling problems of African American boys. Canada asserts that we are facing a crisis situation; gender stress, misperceptions of the male role, and male myths have led many young men on a path to self-destruction. The author emphasizes the necessity of building strong father-son bonds to help boys reach manhood and to perpetuate good father instincts. His book answers the tough questions: "How did things get like this?" and "What can we do?" Recommended for all libraries.?Michael A. Lutes, Univ. of Notre Dame Libs., Ind.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A call to assist boys in their treacherous journey to adulthood rings briefly with truth. Canada (Fist Stick Knife Gun, 1995) obviously knows what he is talking about when it comes to young men in the inner city. Raised in the South Bronx, he is now president of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, an organization employing and guiding urban kids, and ``father'' to four boys he thinks of as sons beyond his own son and stepson. But in this slender volume of home truths, he seems to squander the opportunity to really enlighten readers with his specific experience, opting instead for therapeutic homilies on often familiar themes. In chapters illustrating topics like ``Self-Worth,'' ``Sex,'' and ``Work,'' Canada compares parable-like stories of his own adolescence, suffused with hindsight, with vignettes in the lives of the boys he now helps. In their affectionately deadpan style, they almost become Bill Cosbyesque riffs on the foibles of adolescent boys and their bemused but sage dads. Except, of course, that too many of today's boys don't have the fathers around to be bemused or sage--a moral tacked on in pleas for adult participation in boys' lives, briefly formulated as what ``we as a society must do.'' None of his exhortations is by any means wrong, but given the forces of social fragmentation that have denuded these boys' lives to begin with, the questions of how in the world ``what must be done'' can be, and who the ``we'' to do it really will be, dwarf Canada's earnestness. The Rheedlen programs, to which he occasionally refers, seem to be an interesting example of some ``we'' in action, but we only get a passing glimpse. Useful, at most, as a very basic primer in the reality lived by today's boys; that such an elementary consciousness-raising may be needed, Canada can't be faulted for. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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