Taking the Measure of Man

Sometimes, a book manages to impress simply by exceeding low expectations. Senator Josh Hawley’s Manhood was, for me, such a book. As the title suggests, it’s a “man book,” and in my experience, these tend to fall into two categories. Some consider the needs and struggles of modern males in a careful, circumspect way. Others rant and fuel male resentment. I expected Hawley to embrace the second category, since those books seem to enjoy stronger sales and more attention from the sorts of people he would have reason to impress. Accordingly, I flipped the front cover bracing myself for tendentious diatribes against feminism and bitter rants about dissolute “elites” who sit in their pleasure palaces, sneering at the “great American middle.”