A Best Book of the Year
Time Magazine (Top Ten Nonfiction)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Kansas City Star
San Francisco Chronicle • San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Pick
NPR • Seattle Times • Seattlest Holiday Pick
“Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving’s inventive sleight of hand… As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Hilarious, moving, pleasurable, disturbing, transcendent, restless… And seemingly by accident, Chabon ultimately does create a composite image of ideal manhood, one that is modest, responsible, bemused, empathic, and thoughtful.”
—Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco Chronicle
“Manhood for Amateurs isn’t really Dad Lit… The book is a closer relation to Joan Didion’s White Album… [Chabon is] too disciplined and nimble a thinker ever to descend into cliché narcissistic wallowing, and he shows admirable restraint in not pimping out his children… His analysis is wondrous, wise, and beautiful.”
—David Kamp, New York Times Book Review
“Chabon is more or less incapable of writing a boring sentence. Like Updike, he is an inveterate noticer, and the central appeal of his style lies in its lyric precision… He’s sensationally funny… Chabon proves excellent company, an insightful chatterbox, curious, erudite, occasionally profane, and ultimately wise to the delusions of masculinity… Manhood for Amateurs offers a fascinating glimpse inside the mind of a preeminent literary artist.”
—Steve Almond, Los Angeles Times
“Chabon brings his prodigiously entertaining verbal intelligence to a very personal investigation of what it means to be a father, a son, and a husband.”
—Lev Grossman, Time (Top Ten Nonfiction Books Citation)
“He emerges from these thirty-nine beautifully written personal essays as a prince among men… Daddy diaries are a growing phenomenon. Chabon raises the bar with his often poignant meditations on manhood, fatherhood, and aspects of his own childhood. Most of these loosely connected essays … add up to an episodic autobiography of sorts.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Chabon takes the same brutally observant, unfailingly honest, marvelously human gaze that won him a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and turns it on his own life as a committed husband and father, Lego enthusiast, and unrepentant nerd—in short, as a man.”
—Time
“Chabon trains his twinkling novelist’s eye on the mirror in these essays, finding faults but also satisfaction and cause for laughter… As always, Chabon’s prose acrobatics provide brainy entertainment.”
—Kyle Smith, People (3½ out of 4 stars)
“Lovely.”
—Katy Read, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Thoughtful, perceptive… All propelled by the shimmering prose that won him the Pulitzer Prize.”
—Michael Lindgren, Washington Post
“If it’s true that, as Time has written, Michael Chabon is the Updike of his generation, then Manhood for Amateurs is his Self-Consciousness, Updike’s revealing memoir.”
—Village Voice
“[Chabon] is an emotional orchestra… Manhood for Amateurs is a tour de force—a stunningly acute, funny, and intelligent exploration not just of fathering, but also of sex, death, the pluses and minuses of smoking dope, marriage, friendship, the vital necessity of creative boredom, the phenomenology of hearing old pop tunes on the radio, and anything else toward which Chabon directs his unblocked imagination. A stylist of great delicacy and flexibility, he infuses his writing with a rare combination of feminine sympathy and masculine analytic power.”
—Gary Kamiya, San Francisco
“A fully coherent, incisive examination of his roles as a father, husband, child, writer, and celebrated, self-proclaimed geek… By so profoundly connecting with his own inner child, Chabon makes the business of raising children seem as effortless and graceful as his beguiling fiction.”
—Eric Liebetrau, Boston Globe
“Manhood is no self-help book on how to be a better father, although I’d argue it can’t hurt. Its instructions are more literary: how to write graceful essays that seamlessly jump between the specific and general while helping to raise four children, which is as specific as anything gets.”
—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
“The odds say we’re surely approaching a tipping point for this stuff [Daddy literature]—but, alas, by the grace of Chabon’s glittering prose, it’s not here yet… Both entertaining and thoughtful.”
—Henry C. Jackson, Associated Press
“This book is a buffet of tasty, tapas-size tidbits… There’s something here for everyone, no matter your chromosomal makeup.”
—Chris Tucker, Dallas Morning News
“Ultimately understood in terms of the tension between Chabon’s alternating embrace of an archetypally male role and his alienation from it. That, basically, is (post)modern life, and Chabon might just be one of its most able chroniclers… Chabon has been called ‘his generation’s Updike,’ but in contrast to Updikes’s disappointing attitude toward women, Chabon’s feminism is smart and never feels coached.”
—Pete Coco, Time Out Chicago
“There is no pose in these wise and engaging pieces.”
—Alan Moores, Seattle Times
“Chabon brings to his autobiographical essays the same things that have made his works of fiction among the most celebrated of the past twenty years—a natural affinity for storytelling; a deep sense of nostalgia; unapologetic celebration of his many geeky, guilty pleasures; sly, often devastating humor; unbending honesty—while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of self-aggrandizement, cynicism, shallow epiphany, and self-pity… Manhood for Amateurs offers entertainment as well as enlightening reflections.”
—Marc Covert, Portland Oregonian