Some American Men

Emerson's special qualities that make her journalism in the New York Times notableshe is also a National Book Award winner for Winners and Losersserve well here to delineate portraits of men in their struggles with work, duty, love and manhood. She makes clear, for example, in these cross-generational closeups of American males that ""visible emotion'' is seen ``as a form of surrender,'' even as men suffer deeply; that masculinity is considered to be on endless trial, never fixed or complete; that helplessness is unbearable to men; that work offers a man the chance to assume he is in command. Predictably, there is much talk here of war, of men's emotional responses to armed battle. Candid interviews in a chapter on ``Love and Other Great Risks'' catch men talking unguardedly of how lovefor woman, for father, for childmakes them feel. A fresh picture of American culture and its worn-out stereotypes emerges through this reporter's perceptive essays. November