2012, Dissonant Hum, Milwaukie, OR, 170 pages

I have read Mister Donovan’s work on his site, as well as on some alternative right sites, and have been highly impressed with his clear thinking and refreshingly amoral perspective. For over a year I have intended to buy his book The Way of Men. Having finally done so, last week, I could not put it down. I also kept it for a second reading.

As close as I can tell, 95% of my readers are male, perhaps 5% female. For you males, have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Something in my gut tells me that this world is upside down, that what is right is wrong, that I don’t belong’?

For you females, how often have you disparaged the lack of potential mates that possess the ‘something’ that you desire. How is it so easy to make friends with males, and so difficult to find, among their number, a man you would want to lay down with, and wake up with?

The answers are to be found in Jack Donovan’s short, straightforward examination of what it is to be a man. I honestly regard this book to be the most important thing published since Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth. It is Our Enemy The State, for the 21st Century.

Had I disagreed with anything Jack wrote in The Way of Men I would have happily pushed it aside after reading his two swipes at the venerable Star Trek franchise. I was able to watch the original series with my father as a boy. Then, when ‘The Next Generation’ came on TV, I tried watching a couple episodes and stepped away in disgust. In those adeptly subversive [gee-whiz sociology sci-fi] TV scripts we see the worship of ‘one world government’ spread like a mothering cancer across the cosmos. I have never seen anything more obscenely worshipful in regards to our stifling military-corporate ideal of life than that show.

I will tell you that if you love the premise of Star Trek [basically the UN in space] than Jack’s book is going to disturb you. On the other hand, if you find something indistinctly unsettling about the do-gooder galaxy of the greater good, than a reading of The Way of Men will help you see clearly the fiendish ghost-white hands of the Mommy Matrix that have been scorching your soul as you sleepwalk through life.

Jack has a clean infusive style of writing that reminds me—ironically enough—of Jeanette Walls’, the author of The Glass Castle, the most popular memoir ever written, about a girl coming of age under ridiculous circumstances. He does such an effective job of re-forging the definition of manhood free of all of the religious, feminist, economic, and political trappings our ideal of manhood is always encrusted with, that I have no desire to expose any of his conceptual structure. Let’s just say that Jack Donovan has basically annotated the feelings of all of us who defiantly demand to be more than a chick with a dick.

Below are some brief quotes from The Way of Men

‘…an unreadable map to a junkyard of ideas.’

‘…the line that separates us from them is a circle of trust.’

‘The Way of Men is a tactical ethos.’

‘…I’m pretty sure our ancestors would have killed them and taken their stuff.’

‘There is no high road.’

‘…what good guys and bad guys have in common.’

‘The repudiation of violent masculinity is the murder of male identity.’

Jack Donovan initially comes off as if he is holding up the violent gang lifestyle as a male goal. What he has done in choosing ‘gang’ as his label for small bonded male groups is to splash some cold water in our face and remind us that that crack dealer slinging dope on the corner in one of America’s imploded cities, has more in common with the men who settled this planet and founded those cities, than the denatured ‘man’ that our feminized society says you should be.

Do you want to be the man that your woman wants you to be? Or, do you want to be the man she desires?

Jack points out that we now live in a society in which manhood and womanhood are both defined by women.

My grandmother pointed out to me that she grew up in a society where manhood and womanhood were both defined by men.

I wonder if humanity will ever have a society in which men define manhood and women define womanhood?

I doubt it. I think that the soulless Global Narcostate will eventually eradicate manhood. But, if you don’t believe that The Extinction of Men is inevitable, Jack Donovan has excavated the blueprint for manhood from the ruins of a hundred cultures—just in time.