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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... never losing their queenly bearing and contempt for their op- pressors . Cross them or try to steal their royal husbands , and they're likely to slit your throat . Only in comedy do we meet ordinary , everyday folks - working stiffs ...
... never yet had any vileness said , In all his life , to whatsoever wight . He was truly perfect , gentle knight . The code of medieval chivalry is explored at length in the legends of King Arthur and his knights . The perfect knight was ...
... never know what it means to love , because he lacks the capacity for loyalty to a single beloved : An excess of passion is a bar to love , because there are men who are slaves to such passionate desire that they cannot be held in the ...
... never have enough of the solaces of his beloved . Nothing forbids one woman being loved by two men or one man by two women . As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance , knightly chivalry gave way to the peacetime refinement ...
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