King of the Wild Suburb: A memoir of fathers, sons and guns

Editorial Reviews. Review. With a keen eye for detail and nuance, [Messner] has written a King of the Wild Suburb: A memoir of fathers, sons and guns by [.
Table of contents

• Fathers, Sons and Guns : An Interview With USC Sociologist and Author Michael Messner
• King Of The Wild Suburb A Memoir Of Fathers Sons And Guns – leondumoulin.nl
• 1 182,61 RUB

This is your first memoir. Why did you choose to focus on the role of guns in your relationships with your father and grandfather? The book is an effort to come to grips with my emotional bonds with my father and grandfather, many years after their deaths.

Like many men of their time, neither was comfortable with direct verbal expressions of love for each other, or for me. Instead, rifles, shotguns and hunting trips were the connective tissue of these relationships--first for Dad and Gramps starting in the s, and then for me with them, starting around I had also been initiated in to the post-World War II culture of heroic violent masculinity--through John Wayne movies, television shows, and fantasy gun-play with other boys. My fascination with guns was fed by dreams of male heroism--an ideal I would later rebel against.

But also, on a deeper level, guns were a foundation for a sort of bounded intimacy between Dad, Gramps and me. In rejecting guns and hunting as a young man, was I also rejecting this intimacy, despite its limits?

You describe a sense of loss you felt as a young man when you made the decision not to hunt. The loss had to do with severing an important connection point you had with your grandfather, a WWI veteran, and your father, who served in WWII. I was in my late teens and early twenties and had gotten caught up in the tail-end of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and eventually was inspired by the feminist movement in the s.

I was searching for a new definition of what it means to be a man, a definition grounded in peace, non-violence, equality and respect for women. Part of this youthful quest involved rejecting guns and hunting with Dad and Gramps.

• Christmas Travelers 1969 A True Story.
• Покупки по категориям?
• Book Review: King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns?
• 50 Ways to Control Migraines: Practical, Everyday Tips to Empower Migraine Sufferers to Live a Heada?
• mm-Wave Silicon Technology: 60 GHz and Beyond (Integrated Circuits and Systems)!

I open the book with a description of the last time I went hunting with Dad. I was in college, and felt very torn when he invited me. I decided to go, but to not carry a rifle. I still wonder if this embarrassed him in front of his friends--his long-haired hippy-looking son walking a deer hunt with no rifle. But he never criticized me; instead, he thanked me for coming.

Two years later, he would be dead. And the fact that I severed my ties with him, refusing any longer to hunt with him, still plagues me.

The memoir, in a way, is my poking at the scar left by this self-inflicted wound. Many young men in the s and s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War. But you also write that you learned a great deal about manhood from your father - a highly respected and accomplished high school football and basketball coach in your hometown of Salinas, California -- and your grandfather.

The lessons and example they provided contributed to your development as a profeminist, anti-war man. Can you talk about what you see as some key pieces of the masculinity legacy - good and bad - that you and other men in the Baby Boomer generation inherited from your father's and grandfather's generation? It was much later that I saw this, but I know now that I learned a sense of responsibility to family, and a sort of sticktoitiveness from Dad and Gramps.

I rebelled against the post-war middle class views of gender embodied by my breadwinner father and homemaker mom. But some of the men of the "New Left" I met in the s whom I initially saw as role models for new ways to be men were exploitative of women--both sexually, and in terms of women's labor. I never sought to go back to my parents' gendered family arrangements, but I came to see my dad's treatment of my mom and my two sisters as loving and, very importantly, as respectful..

I have tried to emulate some aspects of that love and respect for women--especially with my wife Pierrette, an accomplished professional and wonderful mother--while seeking to re-shape it in a context of gender equality we have learned from feminism.

You recount a story about killing your first deer, a buck, on a hunting trip with your father, grandfather and a family friend. You write that you tried to put on a face of modest pride, but what you felt inside was "triumphant accomplishment on the surface, mixed with a deep undercurrent of guilt.

1 182,61 RUB

That's a good point. I wonder how many boys and men have experienced this sort of ambivalence during a moment that's supposed to be triumphant? At the age of fifteen, I was a bit surprised, very confused and privately shamed by the dread I felt after killing that buck.

I wasn't supposed to feel that way! But I think in retrospect, this ambivalent feeling became part of the emotional template on which I tried later to re-cast my definitions of masculinity. I think this is a key to re-thinking how we might relate to daily moments with boys: You write movingly that "those hunting trips with Dad and Gramps were actually about fathers and sons finding a way to love each other. These outings were not so much about hunting for deer: Because you gave up hunting before they were born, you never had that as a catalyst to connect with them.

Is that a continuing source of sadness? Did you find other less violent ways to bond with them that will stick with them throughout their lives, as your experiences hunting with your father and grandfather have stayed with you? I write about this in a book a bit. I think those hunting trips with Dad and Gramps are so emotionally salient in my memories because they stand out against a backdrop of not much else. What I mean by that is that it was part of the gender division of labor in my family that Dad wasn't around a lot of the time.

I'm sure I spent many many more childhood hours with Mom than with Dad, so the few things we did together end up taking on greater meaning and importance. When my sons were born, I promised myself that I'd be around alot. I didn't want to just pop in to their lives every week or three and do something with them. However, I wonder whether they will have any memories, years from now, that carry the emotional depth of my memories of hunting with Dad and Gramps.

I end the book with a letter to my sons, posing this this sort of dilemma for them to ponder: I love your book's title, King of the Wild Suburb. On the cover is a photo of you as a three-year-old mowing the lawn in a Davy Crockett hat and tasseled leather jacket, and your father working on the lawn in the background. Can you talk about how you came up with the title, and the role your early socialization had in guiding you toward hunting as a normal and unremarkable part of s white, middle-class American boyhood?

That photo seems to capture a lot of the historical moment, as well as the nature of the side-by-side rather than face-to-face nature of my relationship with my father. I'm not just pushing a lawn mower there--a common symbol of middle-class father-son work in the post-war suburban landscape--I am also toting a toy rifle. I was a three-year-old boy caught up in a national "Crockett Craze. Suddenly, boys throughout America were riding one of the first television-driven consumer waves. In his closely observed memoir, King of the Wild Suburb, noted Gender Studies scholar Michael Messner opens up the affective terrain between fathers and sons, and in the process deepens and complicates our understanding of masculinity.

Alice Echols Author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Michael Messner's reflections on coming of age in the pivotal Sixties deftly captures the fault lines that separated so many young men and women from the lives of their parents and grandparents. It was, perhaps, easier for young women to rebel and choose careers over homemaking than it was for young men to opt out of a culture that made war, guns, and hunting the anchors of manhood.

King of the Wild Suburb helps us understand how masculinity has changed, albeit still precariously, making it possible to maintain a fidelity to one's past while passing on to the next generation a freedom to explore new ways to be a man. Dizard Author of Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America. Messner, a smart sociologist with a keen eye for detail and nuance, has written a subtle and moving book…What makes this book so moving and thoughtful are the connections between fathers and sons that Messner both ponders and experiences even as he defines a new culture of masculinity for himself and his own sons.

By understanding these men better, we understand the complexities of masculinity within each of their generational contexts.