Customer Reviews

US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Each chapter of this book presents a well-detailed, separate profile of a down-and-out male misfit who, struggling, with his sense of belonging or lack thereof, resorts to booze, other addictions, long-winded story-telling, eccentric indulgences, or some extreme macho pursuit or other. LeDuff is a capable writer and an excellent stylist, but his thesis, that the diverse range of contradictory male impulses defy conventional masculine images, is a bit broad and heavy-handed. With a tone that is grim, earnest and too often rich in sanctimony, LeDuff seems to be lecturing us, PBS style, on the "struggles and issues" of working class men. LeDuff is intent on championing his populist cause, so much so that early in the book he criticizes (without naming him) Thomas Friedman for dismissing the working class by arguing that Americans have lost their competitive edge. He'll be damned if he'll let Friedman take such a cheap pot shot and he's going to give sympathetic portraits of gritty working class men and defend them from Friedman's screed. The result is an overly serious, humorless, and in the end somewhat politically boxed-in book. To be fair, I was expecting some more humor, more irony, more playfulness. But I suppose the author felt it necessary to keep everything somber and deadly serious. Too bad because LeDuff is strong talent, he has experienced much around the world, traveling to Iraq for example, and he surely has a lot to say.

I'm sure if LeDuff felt that some white collar writer were lumping all the men of his generation into some group, he'd rant and rave against such stereotyping. But he's eager to do the same, throwing out sweeping generalizations about the men of his generation (once called "X" now called nothing in particular, he asserts). To draw on his experiences at Nevada's Burning Man festival and say his generation "meanders through life without purpose, charting with a broken compass" sounds nice and deep, but in all honesty, are the people who trek into the Nevada desert (or join the gay rodeo circuit, fight-club motorcycle clubs, or bottom-rung football teams) truly the standard-bearers of an entire generation?
Sure, LeDuff, go ahead and write about the down-and-outers, but don't lump everyone else born in the same couple of decades into your groups of directionless losers. Your stories are an interesting look at a small group of disaffected American men, not all of us, so jump down off your high horse of judgement and recognize the limits of your choice of experiences.

Wow, I don't know who this author dislikes more, women (see the Preface for just ONE example) or other guys! I thought it was going to be interviews with a good cross-section of American males from a lot of different walks of life; but with the exception of the chapter on the Detroit cop, the book is a collection of interviews with strange and mostly embittered men going nowhere done by an author who seems pretty bitter himself.

Whether blue collar, white collar; whether a pragmatist or philosopher, this book will give you something to talk about. No matter what type of crowd I'm around, a beer hockey league or a wine and cheese party, I can bring up this book as a conversation piece. That rarely, if ever, happens with a book. Worth the read.

LeDuff is bereft of insight and can only make the most common observations, draw the most obvious conclusions, and write the most weakly derivative Thompson-esque screeds. Always ready to point out that he bought the food or the booze no one LeDuff encounters is portayed as anything less than pitiable but even that is rare compared to the general loathing he exudes for anyone not hip to his attitude. Sorry, Charlie, this book's a pass.

People constantly talk about throwing themselves into their work all the time, but few can match the actual exploits of Charlie LeDuff, author of "US Guys, The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man." In a book that is, at minimum, super-eclectic in scope, LeDuff takes us on a twisted journey across America that introduces us to a series of people who few of us will ever know, or even hear about. In the process he takes on their daily lives - and jobs - even placing himself in harm's way riding bulls in a gay rodeo, fighting bikers in their fight clubs, enduring the indignities of male modeling, becoming a clown in a circus trapeze act, and much more.

We follow the outwardly soulless, but internally committed lives of inner city detectives, the backwater Fundamentalism of Appalachian religious snake worshippers, and society's perpetual losers who associate with fellow down-and-outers at decrepit race tracks as their pathetic family of last resort.

It's a fascinating, yet pitiful, view of an American underclass that most of us would probably prefer not to know. But yet, these men do exist, and there is a sense of nobility to them, and "thanks" to LeDuff, we meet them in all their dubious glory.

I am not sure what motivates someone to devote a good piece of their life taking on the roles and the lives of so many people whose fortunes cannot have turned out the way they had ever envisioned, but LeDuff has done it, and he has made their stories readable and even interesting - and he often does it in a humorous way.

This book was first of all entertaining. LeDuff went to some crazy places and dropped a myriad of inhibitions in exploring some dirty, not often seen parts of America. He is clearly a talented writer, and uses an intruiging if choppy format.

The books first few chapters captivated me, and felt like they were leading to some conclusions. The rest was unfortunatly the same type of experience, for the author and the reader. It was less humorous and led to a more ambiguous ending than I would have liked.

This, for me, is a page-turner and i recommend it to any American MAN. it's laugh-out-loud funny, shocking, and utterly depressing all at the same time...

LeDuff is a brilliant writer. He takes his film crew to the dark underside of the American Male Experience. It's not pretty but his observations are by turns shocking, astonishing, revolting, inspiring, stupefying, and often, very amusing. (*note-sense of humor on part of reader is most helpful.)

He exposes the empty hype of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. He dons the gonzo biker persona to rumble with the Rats. He annoys a former junkie turned evangelist. He gets pounded into the ground as a rodeo bull rider, arena football player, and circus clown cum trapeze artist.

All along the dangerous road he maintains his tough guy pose except when he's weeping. LeDuff has all the tools. This book will blow your mind.

With the subtitle, "The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man," readers can easily discern just how slanted and biased Charlie LeDuff's account of the direct sex is in US Guys. His subtitle, were it to be used in the context of women, would be tantamount to a hate crime. The author would never do that though because, as he admits in the Preface, "I hardly understand women." No doubt he is right but also apparent is his gaudy ignorance of men.

The text is devoid of psychological revelation concerning males, but it does effectively illuminate the pervasive misandry endemic to our culture. Mr. LeDuff possesses as many negative assumptions about men as a Womyn's Studies professor, and he gladly shares them throughout the narrative.

Consider the supposition that time spent brawling with a gang of bikers elucidates the reason "why the American man is so aggressive and angry." It does...assuming one was already convinced of the fact beforehand. The person who is hungry for actual knowledge knows otherwise. Behaviors exhibited by belligerent derelicts cannot be extrapolated to the broader population. After all, deviants are, well, deviant. They are not the norm. The average male neither commits felonies nor scraps on a daily basis.

Yet, in his attempt to depict the soul of the American male, Mr. LeDuff exclusively seeks out the company of freaks. The fallacious menagerie is incorporated by bums in Tulsa, gay rodeo cowboys in Oklahoma City, players on a marginal semi-pro football team in Amarillo, the East Bay Rats motorcycle gang in Oakland, jockeys in Miami, the denizens of the Burning Man festival, and reenactors of the Battle of Little Big Horn. These fellows are no more representative of "US Guys" than my political views are indicative of those held by the average Chicagoan.

The title of this book really should be, "News of the Weird." Of course, that would never sell like one purporting to outline the pathological nature of males. Reports of masculine abomination are precisely the type of thing which fly off the shelves in this country. These essays actually appear to have been created for another purpose altogether. The same topics are covered in episodes from LeDuff's Discovery Channel "Only in America" show. His decision to formally link his experiences to misandry may have been just an afterthought.

US Guys has been dubbed Gonzo journalism which, given the broad confines of the genre, it probably is despite Mr. LeDuff having little in common with Hunter S. Thompson. His travelogue is more in the tradition of Confederates in the Attic as, here too, an intrepid anti-liberal elitist ventures out to our non-Eastern expanses to report back on all the rubes and crackers he came across on the journey.

The pretense that American men possess "true and twisted minds" will undoubtedly endear the author to his intended audience as they regard the nefariousness of men as being an undeniable truth (see the oeuvre of Maureen Dowd). I am sure it sold quite well among those who perpetually look down on their fellow citizens--except for reasons relating to the troika of race, sex, and class. Mr. LeDuff's missive was penned exclusively for the active parishioners of the church of political correctness. Everything they need to reinforce their preexisting superiority and prejudice is here.