Customer Reviews

Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man

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I was told about this book in both a psychology class and in a Communication Between the Genders class, college classes composed mostly of women. During the semester, I was taken aback by my female classmates' intense, even brutal, anger at men and how that anger motivated their attitudes and behaviors. These women had little or no desire to discover ways to neutralize the tensions in the male-female combat zone, but preferred to blame their failings and frustrations on men. Post-divorce, I was not without my own anger, but I could pretty much well identify its causes. Their anger, I noticed, seemed driven by forces they could neither identify nor define. These observations compelled me to find honest answers. I wanted to understand, as objectively as possible, what had created the devastating rift between men and women, beyond the pat explanations espoused by the second wave of the Feminist Movement and the mass media. Sam Keen's book shed much light on the problem with the simple observation that men suffer, and are in these dire straits, because they have not freed themselves from their psychological and emotional bondage to women; they can never define themselves as separate beings so long as they "invest so much of their identity" in women. I am grateful to Keen for providing me this profound understanding and the experience of feeling true empathy for men. Just the same, as long as men choose to remain bonded in these ways to women, and so long as women [and for selfish gains, I might add] proudly wield the power they know they hold over men, no amount of empathy can change the status quo.

I read this book a few years back and I am in debt to its wisdom. It fact Sam Keen may also be indebt to me as I have given this book away as a gift at least a dozen times.

Keen looks at the changing role of men in society in this book. Men were the bread winners in families because that was the way it was supposed to be. With women expected to work, the male role has changed. All of the sudden, men(particularly the white male) has been blamed for many of the ills of society.

Keen explores where a man can find fulfillment in this modern world through roles in work, family, and sex. If you have ever asked yourself the question, "What makes a man, a real man?", this book will help to answer the question. No man should be without this book.

What tells us we are men? Is it how we look on the outside? Is it the way we behave? Unfortunately, if you are looking for these questions, you might as well go away now, for this book is not meant to be read by ideologues who think they need an idea to know.

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...

I had high expectations on this book and to be fair, it delivered for the first 20 or so pages (just like other reviewers have mentioned). Keen gives a great insight; for a man to get in touch with his manhood he has to leave the world of WOMAN. WOMAN, refers to not any specific person but the mental idea or ideal that men devote entirely too much energy in antagonizing, fearing, impressing, etc. that elusive idea. By separating from the world of WOMAN, as I got from the reading, a man can begin to be by and for himself, unhindered by the abstract. That insight garners the book some credit.

Unfortunately, the book does not live up to the strong beginning. It weakens to a trickle with Keens' professorial lecturing and attention to the precise ideas that don't -in my view- work for men looking for their soul. For example, in the chapter relating to aggression, Keen expounds about how the "War System" has influenced all our human relationships; we want to get ahead, step over anyone who gets on our way and destroy our opponents. Really? Is that all there is to aggression? Right then it became obvious Keen has too narrow and ideological a view to help men find their Manhood.

Most importantly, the aggression issue is not properly addressed. Keen devotes several pages to what is wrong with war-like behavior and only, as an afterthought, adds a page at the end of the chapter on the survival value it has. So in essence, after lecturing non-stop about the evils of aggression he tells us that at some point we might need it. Most men reading books on masculinity, and I would underline this if I could, are looking for a justification and articulation of our fierceness, NOT blind destruction, but fierceness as a vital force. We want to hear it is OK, justified, necessary and GOOD, since we are mostly bombarded by the media with bad examples of the destruction male aggressiveness causes. It is an energy, intrinsic in our psyche and physiology and something I'm sure most men picking up a book like this are looking for. Keen ill-serves the reader by giving it such a one-sided treatment. He will return later in the book to the topic of fierceness but it is unfortunately too little.

Further, he also blames the "lack of thunder in men" on the "corporation" state and consumer mentality pervasive in American society. This stroke me as hopelessly naive; my absent fireman father learned to be a distant man from his farmer father, also a distant man. Generationally, we didn't join a "corporation" until I was in my 30s. My ancestors lost whatever thunder they'd pass on to me long before that.

Keen also states that the defining quality of a man ought to be "wonder". I thought about it and while I see value in that quality which -blame it on generation X- I don't feel often, I also see that one could make the argument for "wonder" for both men and women, not just men. Which begs the question, how would wonder help define one as a Man? Then again, can a sense of wonder make one a better person? Probably, in the same way that jogging can help you be a better boxer, except that it won't teach you to actually box. Wonder is fine, but it doesn't really speak to me about being a man necessarily.

Keen spends the vast majority of the book going on a diatribe about left-wing issues (most of which I actually happen to agree with - yet find inappropriate for the subject at hand) and arm-chair philosophizing that is too self-serving to be of much value to me. Fire in the Belly seems to me more an excuse to bash the system than to deliver a guide to that gritty and moist zone men like me are trying to get to. It is mostly empty and subjective, nothing really to -as Keen himself pretentiously stated as a goal for the book- to "move the head, the heart and the gonads". I'm also not sure if a man who "to this day avoids in class reunions the football heroes" of his high school is resolved enough to write a book on this subject.

I'd recommend Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly to anyone looking to travel this path. Even if unnecessarily convoluted and abstruse at times, it is by far the best in a genre so sorely lacking in good material. Secondly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow by Bly as well. Other books such as Wild at Heart take too Christian a perspective and The Compleat Gentleman is, despite some awesome insights, even worse than this book in pushing a political ideology (conservatism), from a man who found the romance of war after refusing to serve in Vietnam and from the convenient position of no longer being of active duty age.

Some people have found good lessons in Fire in the Belly, I say more power to them. I'd would suggest borrowing it from a library or reading through the first chapters and skimming the rest at a bookstore, before buying it.

This book was a watershed for me. I was an extremely frustrated boy of 31 years and couldn't even begin to figure out why until I read this book.
The first third of this book should be required reading for all men, especially fathers. I didn't get as much out of the rest of the book until I read it again. Even then, the real power of the book is in the first six chapters.
This book along with Robert Bly's Iron John have been the two major catalysts for my movement into manhood.

This book has so far been my favorite among all the self improvement books I've read. Its not without it's flaws, but it provides some very insightful views that are well worth checking out.

The book analyzes man's role in society, why it is what it is, what is wrong with it, and what you can do about it. At least, this is the strong point of the book. It also promises to take the reader on a mythic journey, which it didn't really do for me. The book ends a bit weakly, with conclusions clearly based on Keen's own political preferences (which by the way I tend to agree with) rather than any sort of universal truth.

But despite it's flaws, the book is at times truly impressive in it's insightfulness. Even if you do not agree with Keen on everything, it's bound to lead you to think of things in a new way, and that is worth far more than the price of admission.

I'm actually writing this first version of my review while still reading the book. Not all ideas Sam Keen conveys are original but the presentation as a whole has been somewhat of an empiphany for me. That is to say, it has given me jarringly lucid insight into who I am as a male and the very predictable patterns I, and many other men fall into. While reading the first five chapters, I was struck at how well I was described.

I am glad Sam Keen had the courage to write on such a controversial yet worthy topic. All men need to read this book and reflect on their female relationships: mother, partner, children, co-workers and friends alike.

I'm not yet sure that simply the awareness of my male tendancies relative to WOMAN will be a solution to faulty relating, but it is certainly a start. Understanding and acting in a less "programmed" manner would be a worthy goal for men who read this book.

Keen's acknowledgement that although we are all human beings, we are profoundly different in our historical roles, cultural roles, socialization, and (naturally) in our physiology, is a simple yet profound truth that needs to be carried in the front our awareness while interacting with the opposite sex.

This is a vital book for men (and women too) in this age of painful gender division and misunderstanding.

This book is for men who have experienced their emptiness, loneliness, and longing for connection, but whose ways of dealing with these issues are limited by old paradigms and beliefs which could change if exposed to new information. This book, a real treasure, contains much of this new information. I highly, highly recommend it.

Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly, like Robert Bly's Iron John, is around twenty years old this year. It remains in print, and remains on the very short list of "men's studies" books written by men who don't identify themselves explicitly as pro-feminist - though like Iron John, Fire in the Belly is far more friendly to feminism than many feminists would like to admit. Keen differentiates between two kinds of feminism, what he calls "prophetic" and "ideological" feminism. He feels that the difference between them is "largely a matter of mood, tone of voice, focus, emphasis, feeling-tone." Ideological feminism, for Keen, is about blaming, scapegoating and maintaining a state of total war between the sexes; it's what others have called "female supremacism."

Some of the most helpful messages Keen imparts have to do with female power and the way that an internalized, idealized "WOMAN" can keep men in thrall. His estimation of this power is sometimes dead on, but at other times so overblown and mythic that it evokes Camille Paglia's work. The best advice he gives comes in a recounted story from his youth, wherein a man tells him that:

"there are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is `Where am I going?' and the second is `Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble."

As other reviewers have noted, the rest of the book argues from some questionable assumptions about peaceable early humans (Keen buys into noble savage mythology) and finds its sense of urgency in a kind of eco-religiousity. He wants us to abandon the "warfare system" that corrupted men (men have always made war, there is no "kumbaya" pre-history) and become "fierce gentlemen," aligned with women as stewards of the "earth household." This is very much a hubristic SWPL project.

Like all books explicitly about manhood, Fire in the Belly is really a philosophical treatise. The question "what kind of man shall I be" is a highly philosophical question, and your answer is going to draw on some of your most basic assumptions about the human nature, politics, ethics and what makes life worth living. Keen is an engaging if sometimes uncomfortably confessional writer, but to sign on to his program, you have to agree that the world he envisions is possible and desirable. Twenty years on, it seems neither.

(edited from a longer review originally published at the-spearhead.com)

I read this book years ago and had occasion to attend a lecture Sam Keen gave in Dayton, Ohio. I was already immensely impressed by the book, but I have to say that the experience of listening to him live and being able to ask him questions, confirmed all my expectations about him. He is an incredibly wise and sensitive human being with much to offer men, and I believe women, as well. For men, this is MUST reading.