Senator joseph hawley(R-Mo.)’s book on masculinity, called, of course, “Manhood,” is finally out, and the reviews haven’t been very kind.
The book has a 1.19 rating on Goodreads after 57 reviews, and 2.4 stars on Amazon.
The word of the book critics is not much better, with Rebecca Onion of Slate delivering which may be the most trenchant of all.
“Like almost everything Hawley does, the book is an epic disaster,” he wrote. “Why did a man who is probably our top national pipsqueak decide that promoting masculinity was his ticket to his political power?”
“This culture warrior perspective on masculinity is so strange to read, knowing Hawley’s political debt to the consumerist MAGA, gimme-give, damn consequences vibe that currently dominates the Republican Party. In the chapter on being a ‘king’, Hawley briefly acknowledges the existence of men who ‘desperately want authority for all the wrong reasons’. So he basically describes donald trump, a person whose name does not appear in this book: ‘They groom, abuse, dominate. They see others as means to their own ends.’”
Washington Post book critic Becca Rothfeld fired the book as “two-bit therapy.”
“What is a man, anyway?” Rothfeld wrote. “Hawley’s various responses are not very illuminating. Men are dependent (‘a man cannot be who he should be by himself’) but also independent (‘dependency is in fact a temptation for every man, in every age. It is the temptation to let someone else do it for himself. same’). you’).”
Jon Schwarz of The Intercept laments that the book is short and long at the same time.
“Short because it’s a mere 200-page op-ed, and long because it’s preternaturally boring,” Schwarz wrote. “There are no jokes, not even a single ironic comment. Eating it is like eating a small but dense log of tallow.”
Schwarz also points out that Hawley never mentions his most infamous moment: fleeing congress after the rioters he had greeted earlier invaded the Capitol.
Lloyd Green of The Guardian hit hawley as “a plutocrat-populist as well as a bullying moralist”.
Hawley has been promoting his book by touring right-wing media and religious events.
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