cover image Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology

Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology

. Crossing Press, $12.95 (297pp) ISBN 978-0-89594-581-5

Though some of these more than 40 personal accounts of boyhood convey the exquisite angst spawned by the contemporary men's movement, the broad range of experiences should strike many chords. A first section groups stories of emerging boyhood: Gordon Murray links childhood bullying to the macho bluster of the Gulf War, while Shepherd Bliss, the son of a career soldier, laments his circumcision and his family's warrior culture. In a second section, on family life, Oka Martin recalls the masculine dominance of traditional Nigerian society, while the Maltese-born John Mifsud learns of the WW II heroism of a father whose Alzheimer's disease had rendered him lost to his young son. The third section, on boyhood and the world, includes one devastating essay: Jerrold Ladd's potent account of surviving in the Dallas ghetto as the child of a junkie mother who enlisted his aid in shooting up and sent him begging to neighbors for food. A final section, on boyhood and the soul, includes Thomas Moore's evocation of how his grandfather died saving his life. The book presents not only international voices, but gay ones as well. Some of the essays and poems originally appeared in magazines like The Sun and Changing Men. Abbott edited Men and Intimacy. (Nov.)