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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... friends and colleagues have rendered good advice , useful tips , and practical assistance . Thanks are due in particular to my agent , Chris Calhoun , of Sterling Lord Literistic . My student research assistants , Geoffrey Kellow ...
... friends as well as lovers . To identify manliness with this brutal spasm of reactive violence , even when the motive is understandable , is ultimately just to reinforce the darker currents in our culture and contribute to the victory of ...
... friends . But for the philosopher , the highest friend- ship a man can have is the love of another person who is devoted to pur- suing the same moral and intellectual virtues he is , and that other person is more likely to be a man than ...
... friendship . That's why , when we have a proper understanding of erotic matters , maturity is more satisfying than sexual frenzy . As another of Castiglione's characters , Pietro , sums it up : It nearly always happens that young men ...
... friends before they become lovers . Consequently , once they are permit- ted to marry , they can abandon themselves to their sexual passion with no feelings of shame or confusion . Sexual pleasure does not have to sub- stitute for ...
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