Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
by Sam Keen

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• inspiring answers to manhood.

Book Reviews of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

Book Review: Well written, profoundly deep, missing nothing
Summary: 5 Stars

We have all tread the mass of upgrades to our lives called "women," hopping from one to the next without fulfillment. Some of us have also played the nice guy/poindexter role into night and day until our wallets broke and then we were left without anything. We have tried to be male in so many different ways, but there is one that outshines them all. It is the one that lies above the grave of impossibility.

In his excellent and thorough essay, Keen urges us at the end of the first chapter not to skirt through the book but to read carefully each passage. We've been stranded for too long on a desolate island, asking for attention. Our hearts and minds have been callously stupefied by our advances, and by our society and time, which have been of no help to us at all. Being manly doesn't mean we necessarily have to exaggerate our strength in order to *look* like a man. Instead, the prayer is that we might express something greater within ourselves and not be afraid of how manly we look to others.

One of the first things we must do, Sam says, is to challenge our misconceptions about WOMAN. This is "WOMAN" with all caps. She's the undying witch who comes to scare us, night after night, after we have fallen asleep. The little boy who fears the witch is still there has not left us, for we have not gotten over our very private concerns about who She is.

The quintessential journey into the heart, for a man, starts at the place where he begins to accept the uncertainty of his maleness. Beyond this, he has always an abundance of tools and source material to solve his ordinary problems in everyday ways, and if he can play up to the mastery of this experience he will eventually become a man. In chapter ten, Keen writes about this, telling us a quote by Martin Luther: "Our good is hidden, and so profoundly that it is hidden under its opposite. Thus our life is under death, love of ourselves under hate of ourselves, glory under ignominy, salvation under perdition, justice under sin, strength under infirmity, and universally every one of our affirmations under its negation."

Indeed, our strength does come from its opposite.

If we are to escape past the predicaments that have held us in and reveal the secret knots that we have tied, not only for ourselves, but for our love of the world, then we must undertake the questor's journey into the root of the darkness. Are we men or are we not? Read on...

Summary of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

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