The Code of Man

Waller R. Newell

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061956584
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"In many ways, " Waller R. Newell writes, "young men today are in deep spiritual trouble. But they are also yearning for a way back to the noblest ideals of American manhood. " The Code of Man represents a deep and thought-provoking effort to help guide contemporary men back to those ideals, as embodied in what Newell calls the five paths to manliness: love, courage, pride, family, and country. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, he argues, we have grown so concerned about the roles of sex and violence in our society that we have forgotten the older virtues: romance and eros, courage and patriotism, the blend of love and bravery it takes to raise a family. In The Code of Man, he exhorts us to look to the traditional virtues of the past for inspiration. Contrasting the time-honored lessons of traditional voices -- Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen and Teddy Roosevelt -- with the chaotic signals emanating from sources like Eminem, video games like Thrill Kill, and Goth culture, Newell illustrates how we have come to associate courage with violence, "transgression" with wisdom. Most disturbing, he argues, the essential triumph of Western culture may have left us with a building reserve of untapped aggressive energy, and no consensus about how to channel it -- a situation that threatens to weaken us at the core. Seamlessly weaving together literary references from a diverse body of sources, Waller Newell offers an open-eyed look at what it means to be a man in America today, and a clarion call to recapture our traditions if we are to preserve our character as a society... and avoid catastrophe.

SEARCHABLE TERMS

Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

Abbott, Jack, 87

Achilles, 63–65, 66, 67–68, 114–16

Adams, Henry, 19

Adams, John, 209

Adams, John Quincy, 215–16

adultery, 177–79

Adultery, 178

adversity, 120–21, 142

Aeneid (Virgil), 13

Aeschylus, 16

Aesop’s Fables (Aesop), 117, 182–83

Agamemnon, 63–64, 66

Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 42–43

aggression, xix–xxi, 50, 54, 58, 63–69, 78–80, 88

Alberti, Leon Battista, 184–86

Alda, Alan, xxix

Alfred the Great, 132–33 al-Qaida, 85, 196, 233

Altamont, 5, 76

American Beauty, 10

American Psycho (Ellis), 11

American Psycho (movie), 11

American Revolution, 201, 206, 210

androgyny, 5

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 35–36, 42, 43, 137–39, 179

Annie Hall, 76

anti-feminism, 10–11

Antony, Mark, 122

Aphrodite, 17

Apollo, 14, 17–18, 113–14

Aquinas, Thomas, 72

Aristotle, xxii, 15, 18, 56–57, 60, 67

on courage, 69–72, 87–88, 89, 92

on family, 156, 159–60

on pride, 105, 106–8, 126–29, 130, 142, 222

on wisdom, 109, 126–29

Artemis, 14

Arthur, King of the Britons, 19–20, 131–32

Art of Courtly Love, The (Capellanus), 21–22

Athena, 14, 17, 19, 114, 161–64

Athens, ancient, 57

Augustine, Saint, xii, 17–18, 129–31, 133, 134

Aurelius, Marcus, 122–23, 203

Austen, Jane, 36–42, 177, 178

Bacon, Francis, 173–74

Balzac, Honoré de, 13, 178

Barker, Ernest, 198

Beach Blanket Bingo, 7

Beatles, 250, 251–52

Beecher, Henry Ward, 223–25

Bening, Annette, 10

Bergman, Ingrid, xxvi, xxvii

Bewitched, 157–58

Bible, The, 66–67, 154–55, 202

bisexuality, 5

Black Hawk Down, xxx

Blankenhorn, David, 9, 235–36

Blood Brothers (Price), xxiv

Bloom, Allan, xv, 32, 255

Blue Velvet, 149, 150

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 4–5

Bogart, Humphrey, xxvi, xxvii, 157

Bolshevism, xxi, 85, 88

Book of the Courner, The (Castiglione), 12, 23–26, 134

Bowers, Jim, 142

Brando, Marlon, 249–50

Braveheart, 72

Brean, Joseph, 49

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Wallace), 3–4

Broderick, Matthew, 91–92

Brutus, Marcus, 121–22, 142

Bukharin, Nikolai, 85

Bulfinch, Thomas, 131–32

Bullock, Alan, 90, 91

Buñuel, Luis, 33

Burgess, Anthony, xxi

Burke, Edmund, 32, 244

Bush, George W., xii, xxiii, 201

Byatt, A. S., xxvii

Byron, ...