Book Giveaway and Review – Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

I am thrilled to announce that not only am I lucky enough to have received a copy of this book to review for my blog, but I’m also giving away 3 copies of this book to 3 lucky winners! 

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon is a highly entertaining memoir about what it means to actually be a man.  Sure, that may sound like a simple concept, but the book is written in a highly moving manner by a brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning author.  Seriously, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son is as funny, smart, heart-wrenching, visual, emotional, poignant, hopeful, and wicked as you could ever want a memoir to be. 

Photo courtesy of The Simpsons.  Chabon is on the left.

If you aren’t familiar with Michael Chabon, the celebrity author whose been on The Simpsons, who was the screenwriter for Spiderman 2, and who has also written several other novels including The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and, my absolute favorite, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, well, you are in for a real treat with his latest book that comes out in paperback Tuesday.  Just look at the cover!

Photo courtesy of Harper Perennial

Chabon is a writer who specializes in literary fiction, and this gem of a book allows us a rare glimpse inside the head of a literary and pop-culture genius.  Manhood for Amateurs is a collection of 39 personal essays, which present Chabon’s take on everything just about everything, in his manly and not-so-manly experiences as a father, son, grandson, husband, son-in-law, and lover.  In I Feel Good About My Murse, Chabon writes the following about his absolute need to carry a man purse:  “It holds my essential stuff, including a book – for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one’s pocket – but no more, and so I can wear it, and my masculinity, and my contempt for those who might mock or misunderstand me, very lightly indeed.” 

In his essay Xmas, Michael Chabon describes himself as a “liberal agnostic empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew, and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlie religious fundamentalism of every flavor, from bearded to clean-cut.”  I share this with you not only because it is a perfect sentence to describe Chabon, but because I couldn’t agree with him more.  While I am not a Jew, I did work at a Jewish camp and have harbored a not-so-secret Jewish fetish for all Jews due to my admiration of Anne Frank, the horrors they endured because of the Holocaust, and the stereotype that really seems to be true regarding their mad skills in business.  In my humble opinion, this book should be on your Must-Read list for 2010. 

I’ve marked sixteen other passages from the book that I was planning on sharing here in my review, and I’ve just realized that there is no way some of you want me to share all of them here.  Some of you love him, and don’t need to read another word.  Some of you probably just want to move along to the contest.  I suspect some of you have ADHD and can’t read long blog posts.  Some of you don’t have the time, and some of you have already been sold by what I’ve already written.  But, for those of you who may need just one more reason to convince you why you need to read this book, let me share this with you, so we all can move along.  In Art of Cake, Chabon shares his love of being in the kitchen.  He writes “I grew up during a time of dissolving boundaries, shifting economies, loosened definitions of male and female, of parent and child.  Without shame or stigma, a marriage could be allowed to come undone, a woman could become a lawyer and go out and earn a good living.  And a boy could take to the kitchen, the center of every home, and find there is a sense of history and connectedness to anchor him, something that would not disappear or blow away or change beyond recognition.  The processes of the kitchen, the secret chemistry of sugar by heat, are unchanging.  Even if we can’t master them, they are constant and true.”

To purchase your copy of Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, go here.

To visit Michael Chabon’s website, click here.

 

The author Michael Chabon

Photo courtesy of Michael Chabon.  You’ve gotta love that he’s a Trekkie.

RULES:
**U.S. RESIDENTS ONLY
**NO P.O. BOXES, PLEASE
**MUST INCLUDE EMAIL ADDRESS IN COMMENT
**ALL COMMENTS MUST BE SEPARATE TO COUNT

HOW TO ENTER:

 

+1 ENTRY: Go to Michael Chabon’s website HERE and tell me via your comment below what fun or interesting thing you learned or noticed on his website. 

+1 MORE ENTRY: Watch the video above, and tell me what you liked about it. 

+1 MORE ENTRY: Comment if you are a loyal follower of his, either on Facebook or Goodreads.  Tell me where and how you follow him. 

+1 MORE ENTRY: Comment here and tell me why you need to win this book!  If you’ve read other books of his, share that fact as well. 

+5 MORE ENTRIES: Blog about this giveaway, share a link via Twitter, or post a link via Facebook or any other social networking site about my Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son giveaway and come back here and leave a comment with that link.

Contest ends next Sunday, May 16th at midnight.  Good luck to you all.

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