The Code of Man: Love Courage Pride Family Country"In many ways," Waller R. Newell writes, "young men today are in deep spiritual trouble. But they are also yearning for a way back to the noblest ideals of American manhood." The Code of Man represents a deep and thought-provoking effort to help guide contemporary men back to those ideals, as embodied in what Newell calls the five paths to manliness: love, courage, pride, family, and country. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he argues, we have grown so concerned about the roles of sex and violence in our society that we have forgotten the older virtues: romance and eros, courage and patriotism, the blend of love and bravery it takes to raise a family. In The Code of Man, he exhorts us to look to the traditional virtues of the past for inspiration. Contrasting the time-honored lessons of traditional voices -- Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen and Teddy Roosevelt -- with the chaotic signals emanating from sources like Eminem, video games like Thrill Kill, and Goth culture, Newell illustrates how we have come to associate courage with violence, "transgression" with wisdom. Most disturbing, he argues, the essential triumph of Western culture may have left us with a building reserve of untapped aggressive energy, and no consensus about how to channel it -- a situation that threatens to weaken us at the core. Seamlessly weaving together literary references from a diverse body of sources, Waller Newell offers an open-eyed look at what it means to be a man in America today, and a clarion call to recapture our traditions if we are to preserve our character as a society ... and avoid catastrophe. |
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... common sense , and , combined with it , the lift of generous enthusiasm toward whatever is right . These are the qualities which go to make up true national greatness . - THEODORE ROOSEVELT Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION xi I ...
... common good as opposed to our right to live exactly as we please . At the same time , authors and public policy advocates like David Blankenhorn and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead have drawn atten- tion to the devastating effects of the ...
... common theme throughout three thousand years of reflections on the meaning of manliness , from Plato's Symposium to Castiglione's Book of the Courtier , from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Mozart's Marriage of Figaro . A man's love ...
... common good " between them . In this sense , it has little in common with the more flamboyant versions of romantic passion , a more modern kind of outlook originating in the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries ( although , as we'll ...
... common desire to carry out all of love's precepts in the other's embrace . Eight centuries after these maxims were written , a reader has no dif- ficulty grasping their meaning : Nothing is worse than when the one you love doesn't love ...
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