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| The Lost Patriarch |
| Towards a New Mythology of Manhood |
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| Category: |
Self-Help |
| Author: |
Stephen Duke |
| Publisher: |
AuthorHouse |
| Price: |
£12.50 |
| ISBN: |
978145944438 |
| Pages: |
292 |
| Reviewed in issue: |
7 |
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The Lost Patriarch is a useful book, decently presented and covering a broad sweep of issues pertinent to the male experience in what the author, somewhat wishfully, calls ‘post-patriarchy’. A blended mixture of armchair psychology and narrow gauge art-lit references, the tone can certainly be irksome, a trait shared by many books on ‘manhood’ – but at its best it names the core issues of loneliness, alienation, ‘lostness’, ennui and the relationship to violence that so characterise this culture of ours and its patriarchal distortions.
One criticism I would level, (beyond some sloppy grammar, spelling and presentation issues) is that the book rather pretends towards a radicalism (check the cover – the bare tit behind a broken pane of glass) that it falls a good way short of realising. There’s nothing new here, and although the synthesis of pithy insights and summarising skill does produce a work of some value, there is no new myth of manhood presented, beyond a few renamed subpersonalities.
So this is a worthwhile book, though I worry about its potential readership – it’s too dilettante for men working with, say, Deida, Bly, Biddulph or Rowan, and it’s unlikely to drill into the awareness of tabloid Man. As such it feels like a work in progress, a sort of summary of a starting point for a deeper engagement with this epochally important subject – can men be mended before their distortions, in the form of patriarchy, extinguish life itself? |
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