Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
by Sam Keen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sam KeenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1992-03-01
ISBN: 0553351370
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Product features:
- inspiring answers to manhood.
Book Reviews of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
Book Review: A Bird's Eye View of Masculinity
Summary: 3 Stars
I had high expectations on this book and to be fair, it delivered for the first 20 or so pages (just like other reviewers have mentioned). Keen gives a great insight; for a man to get in touch with his manhood he has to leave the world of WOMAN. WOMAN, refers to not any specific person but the mental idea or ideal that men devote entirely too much energy in antagonizing, fearing, impressing, etc. that elusive idea. By separating from the world of WOMAN, as I got from the reading, a man can begin to be by and for himself, unhindered by the abstract. That insight garners the book some credit.
Unfortunately, the book does not live up to the strong beginning. It weakens to a trickle with Keens' professorial lecturing and attention to the precise ideas that don't -in my view- work for men looking for their soul. For example, in the chapter relating to aggression, Keen expounds about how the "War System" has influenced all our human relationships; we want to get ahead, step over anyone who gets on our way and destroy our opponents. Are we to believe that aggression is not inherent in humans?
Most importantly, the aggression issue is not properly addressed. Keen devotes several pages to what is wrong with war-like behavior and only, as an afterthought, adds a page at the end of the chapter on the survival value it has. So in essence, after lecturing non-stop about the evils of aggression he tells us that at some point we might need it. Most men reading books on masculinity, and I would underline this if I could, are looking for a justification and articulation of our fierceness, NOT blind destruction, but fierceness as a vital force. We want to hear it is OK, justified, necessary and GOOD, since we are mostly bombarded with bad examples of the destruction male aggressiveness. It is an energy, intrinsic in our psyche and physiology and something I'm sure most men picking up a book like this are looking for. Keen ill-serves the reader by giving it such a one-sided treatment. He will later in the book return to the topic of fierceness, but it is unfortunately too little.
Further, he also blames the "lack of thunder in men" on the "corporation" state and consumer mentality pervasive in American society. This stroke me as hopelessly naive; my absent fireman father learned to be a distant man from his farmer father, also a distant man. Generationally, we didn't join a "corporation" until I was in my 30s. My ancestors lost the thunder they'd pass on to me long before that.
Keen also states that the defining quality of a man ought to be "wonder". I thought about it and while I see value in that quality which -blame it on generation X- I don't feel often, I also see that one could make the argument for "wonder" for both men and women, not just men. Which begs the question, how would wonder help define one as a Man? Then again, can a sense of wonder make one a better person? Probably, in the same way that jogging can help you be a better boxer, except that it won't teach you to actually box. Wonder is fine, but it doesn't really speak to me about being a man necessarily.
Keen spends the vast majority of the book going on a diatribe about left-wing issues (most of which I actually happen to agree with - yet find inappropriate for the subject at hand) and arm-chair philosophizing that is too self-serving to be of much value to me. Fire in the Belly seems to me more an excuse to bash the system than to deliver a guide to that gritty and moist zone men like me are trying to get to. It is mostly empty and subjective, nothing really to -as Keen himself pretentiously stated as a goal for the book- to "move the head, the heart and the gonads". I'm also not sure if a man who "to this day avoids in class reunions the football heroes" of his high school is resolved enough to write a book on this subject.
I'd recommend Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly to anyone looking to travel this path. Even if unnecessarily convoluted and abstruse at times, it is by far the best in a genre so sorely lacking in good material. Secondly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Bly as well. Other books such as Wild at Heart take too Christian a perspective and The Compleat Gentleman is, despite some awesome insights, even worse than this book in pushing a political ideology (conservatism), from a man who found the romance of war after refusing to serve in Vietnam and from the convenient position of no longer being of active duty age.
Some people have found good lessons in Fire in the Belly, I say more power to them. I'd would suggest borrowing it from a library or reading through the first chapters and skimming the rest at a bookstore, before buying it.
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