Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity - Hardcover

Jivani, Jamil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1443453196 ISBN 13: 9781443453196

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2018

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award

The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him.

Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.

Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Jamil Jivani who grew up in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration, was raised in a home with a largely absent father and knows what it is to encounter negative influences posing as authorities on masculinity. As a young man he found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale University and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.

At the age of twenty-eight, following the 2015 Paris attacks, Jivani sought to better understand young men in crisis by exploring the conditions that embolden violent extremists. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men from the very neighborhood Jivani was trying to understand. Many young men experience crises in their private lives, and they harm others in the process. News headlines regularly highlight examples of young men who turn to gangs, terror cells or other extremist groups, revealing much deeper problems in Europe and North America, and the urgent need to give young people a sense of belonging in the West.

Why Young Men is a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.

About the Author

Jamil Jivani was born and raised in Toronto. He is a visiting professor at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School, where he focuses on issues affecting youth, immigrants and low-income families. He founded the Citizen Empowerment Project, an organization leading initiatives related to policing, racial profiling, democratic participation and economic development. Jivani attended Yale Law School and served as president of the Yale Black Law Students Association. He has worked for a US senator, as a high school teacher in the US and Kenya and as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan. Since graduating he has practised corporate law in Toronto, acted as a management consultant and was named the 2015 Young Lawyer of the Year by the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers.

Twitter: @jamiljivani

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1443453196
• ISBN 13: 9781443453196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272