A Fine Young Man: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Adolescent Boys into Exceptional Men - Hardcover

Gurian, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0874779197 ISBN 13: 9780874779196

Publisher: Tarcher, 1998

Synopsis

The author of The Wonder of Boys offers an innovative approach to guiding boys through the perilous years of adolescence, offering practical suggestions for coping with the complex biology, emotional upheaval, social ties, rites of passage, and other facets of the challenging years from ten to twenty. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

Building on the success of his guide to raising healthy young boys (The Wonder of Boys, Michael Gurian has written the next chapter--a book focusing on the much-maligned adolescent male. Gurian asserts, "We do not understand adolescent-male development, and therefore are unable to give our adolescent males the kind of love they need to become fully responsible, loving, and wise men." Adolescent boys may appear to be self-sufficient, but Gurian asserts that they actually need their parents and elders desperately. The author carefully illustrates what we--as parents, mentors, and educators--need to know about male adolescents, and what we can do to aid them on their journey to adulthood.

In the face of many sociologists and scholars who strongly declare the contrary, Gurian claims a biological basis for many male behavioral traits. In A Fine Young Man, he employs convincing data from scientific studies on neurological development to assert that female and male brains have significant differences, and that testosterone plays an important role in male development and behavior.

But A Fine Young Man offers far more than theory. Gurian's arguments are firmly rooted in reality, and he offers specific suggestions for typical family dilemmas. He breaks down the stages of development into preadolescence, early, middle, and late adolescence; discusses education and the role of the media; and suggests ways to keep aggression (caused in part by the testosterone flooding the adolescent male brain) from becoming violence. In a social sense, Gurian says, adolescent boys are our most undernourished population, and A Fine Young Man encapsulates his hope that our neglected young men receive the nurturing they need. --Ericka Lutz

About the Author

Michael Gurian is a psychotherapist and bestselling author whose books include The Wonder of Boys and The Good Son. His work reflects the diverse cultures (European, Asian, Middle Eastern, and American) in which he lived, worked, and studied. He has taught psychology, religion, mythology, and literature at three American universities and at Ankara University in Turkey. He lives with his wife and two children in Spokane, Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tarcher
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0874779197
• ISBN 13: 9780874779196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 297