‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway and ‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith

‘Notes on Being a Man’ by Scott Galloway

Scott Galloway’s best-selling book “begins in appropriately manly fashion,” said Brian Stewart in Commentary. Batting away a tenet of liberal orthodoxy, he declares that there’s no such thing as “toxic masculinity” because bullying and predation are the antithesis of authentic masculine behavior. “Real men don’t start bar fights,” he writes. “They break them up.” What makes that assertion remarkable is “not so much the argument itself as where it’s coming from.” Unlike so many of today’s champions of “men’s rights,” Galloway is no reactionary. A millionaire investor turned podcaster and New York University marketing professor, the 61-year-old aligns as a Democrat and welcomes the progress women continue to make toward professional and economic equality. In his view, though, men’s true purpose is threefold: to “protect, provide, and procreate.” And while Notes on Being a Man is mostly memoir, “it is meant to serve as a kind of self-help guide for young men who are alone and adrift.”

I don’t envy Galloway, said Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post. “He seeks the dubious distinction of being a better version of a very bad thing”: a champion of men who insists on drawing a sharp line between men’s and women’s needs. Though he doesn’t hate women, as far-right influencers Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes do, he does propose that men have a different moral orientation that is an outgrowth of physical differences. And by casting men as society’s “providers” and “protectors,” he reinforces the notion that men naturally hold the superior position. In other words, he’s buttressing “the same ugly hierarchy we have always had.”

“Reading Galloway, one gets the sense that men last knew who they were about 75 years ago,” said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. In the 1930s, he reminds us, American men built the Hoover Dam astonishingly quickly and a decade later ventured overseas and defeated fascism. To prove that today’s young men are in crisis, he cites familiar statistics about male unemployment and suicide rates, yet he doesn’t mention that women attempt suicide more frequently or that they can match men’s earnings only by gaining an education edge. In fact, “if you tilt some of the most commonly cited data points this way or that, you can just as easily argue on the behalf of a woman crisis as a man crisis—or, perhaps most accurately, for an ongoing crisis affecting us all.” In the end, Galloway is forced to argue that men feel the pain of economic anxiety more acutely than women, which doesn’t sound very manly at all. “So why make this about manhood?” Galloway’s ideal modern man could be described as “a kind and conscientious sort who aspires to make a decent living and who looks after their loved ones.” Those traits, fortunately and curiously, “seem blessedly gender-free.”

‘Bread of Angels: A Memoir’ by Patti Smith

“How many memoirs can a richly lived life fill?” asked David Hajdu in The New York Times. Patti Smith has now written several autobiographical books of poetry and prose, “yet one of the marvels of Bread of Angels is that, for a work by a memoirist of uncommon prolificacy, it is remarkably fresh.” Fifteen years after Just Kids, a portrait of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that earned her a National Book Award, she has produced a cradle-to-today account of her 79 years that sheds light on life chapters she’s said little about before. “Smith lingers with particular affection on early childhood,” while the book’s biggest reveal may be its “slow, warm” section on the decade-plus that she spent raising two kids in Michigan after she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith of the band MC5, withdrew from the cultural spotlight in 1979.

“Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale,” said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Born in 1946, she was raised in southern New Jersey by loving parents with little money and sustained herself on the power of imagination. Though often sick, she was also resilient, and “her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes.” The pace of the memoir accelerates once Smith boards a bus to New York City at 20, writes and performs poetry, and falls in with an array of other super talents, including Mapplethorpe, Sam Shepard, and Susan Sontag. Her own fame explodes with the release of her 1975 debut album, Horses.

Fred’s death in 1994, at just 46, is “followed by a cascade of other losses,” which in turn “trigger a creative rebirth,” said Will Hermes in The Guardian. We see the godmother of punk return to writing and performing, and she has barely slowed since. Her voice on the page, it should be noted, “can take some getting used to,” because it’s “oddly formal” and can feel repetitive and indulgent. “But once you settle in, it casts a potent spell, and you’ll learn as much about the artist from her style as from the stories themselves.” Clearly, the Patti Smith we have known and see here in full gave birth to herself. In effect, “she sang herself into being.”