Guts And Manhood

Manhood requires courage. In a culture that embraces male passivity, real manhood requires countercultural fearlessness and strength. In Guts and Manhood: Four Irrefutable Attributes of Courage, bestselling author Jim Ramos calls men to action, stirring their hearts to live life fully and courageously.Guts and Manhood will guide you through timeless truths to embrace the courageous role God designed for your life. It won't always require feats of daring, but it will demand a departure from the mundane of the daily grind. Whether faced with war?me deployment or changing your first-born's diaper, marriage strife or career decisions, there is a gutless path and a courageous one.Courage is a personal choice, and Jim will teach you how to choose wisely and live courageously. Jim Ramos, the author of the bestselling Strong Men Dangerous Times, has spent his life discipling men in churches and coffee shops, football fields and duck blinds. He is uniquely skilled at revealing the best inside every man. His father-coach approach encourages men who desire to stand strong and pursue courage with intentionality.

This book furthers academic scholarship in cutting-edge areas of geographical and geopolitical writing by drawing on a series of little-studied undersea living projects conducted by the US Navy during the Cold War (Project Genesis, Sealab I, II and III). Supported by an engaging and novel empirical setting, the central themes of the book revolve around the practice and construct of ‘territory’, ‘terrain’, the ‘elemental’ and the interrelationships between these material phenomenon and both human and non-human bodies. Furthermore, the book will point to future research trajectories in the form of ‘extreme geographies’ to better understand living practices in a world that is increasingly submerged and extreme.

“This is a memoir: a package of boasts, false modesty, flawed memories, dropped names, outright errors, and embarrassing disclosures that I think are pretty neat–but may appall you, if you’re squeamish or have an orderly turn of mind.”—Robert Nylen The thing is, Robert Nylen should have died several times in 1968. He was a goner in 2006, and 2007 as well, and yet he survived through a combination of dumb luck and sheer perseverance. Of course, as you read these words, he’s already bit the dust. But let’s not dwell on that. A self-confessed reckless jerk, Nylen spent the last four years of his life grappling with Big Diseases (cancer, diabetes), an astonishing twelve broken bones, and ten surgeries. His lifetime total is twenty-four fractures, most of which resulted from a flagrant refusal to act his age–or anyone’s age, for that matter. And yet Guts is not a mere chronicle of injuries but a sharp and wry meditation on American Manhood. Growing up in suburbia in the ’50s and ’60s, with a father who had worked on the atom bomb, Nylen was an immature kid who was always eager for attention. In college he became a slovenly, hard-partying fraternity brother who barely graduated. Then came the realization that he was going to have to go to Vietnam. A dramatic tour of duty came to an abrupt end with multiple wounds, leading him to grow up fast. It was then that he started the real risky business: business itself. Some ventures succeeded and some failed. He exercised feverishly and often displayed a complete lack of common sense. And then he got sick, inevitably, with colon cancer. Hilarious, moving, and riveting, this is the life of a tough guy as seen through the scope of a national obsession with toughness. Whether he was facing Viet Cong as a platoon leader in Vietnam or doing battle with venture capitalists at home, Nylen never backed down from a good fight–and he had the many scars to prove it. In Guts, Robert Nylen writes with humor and precision about the travails–and glory–of manhood.

In many forms of discourse, specific parts of the human anatomy may signify the whole body/person. In this volume, scholars from a variety of historical and cultural studies disciplines examine scientific, medical, popular, and literary texts, paying special attention to the different strategies employed in order to establish authority over the body through the management of a single part. By considering body parts that are usually ignored by scholars, these essays render the idea of a single, coherent body untenable by demonstrating that the body is not a transhistorical entity, but rather, deeply fragmented and fundamentally situated in a number of different contexts.

We live in a world obsessed with abdomens. Whether we call it the belly, tummy, or stomach, we take this area of the body for granted as an object of our gaze, the subject of our obsessions, and the location of deeply felt desires. Diet, nutrition, and exercise all play critical roles in the development of our body images and thus our sense of self, not least because how we are made to feel about bodies (both our own and those of others) is often grounded in dietary and lifestyle choices. Cultures of the Abdomen traces the history of social, cultural, and medical ideas about the stomach and related organs since the seventeenth century, and demonstrates that a focused study of the abdomen is necessary for understanding the deep historical meanings that underscore our contemporary obsessions with hunger, diet, fat, indigestion, and excretion. It locates that history from dietary ideals in early modern Europe to the vexing issue of American fat in the twenty-first century, surveying along the way developments in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Masculinity is not toxic. Being a strong man is still a quality to be celebrated, even within the chaos of a shifting society. Strong Men Dangerous Times aims to accomplish one task-to help you to understand manhood. This blue-collar, bare-knuckle guide boldly defines what a strong man is and dispels all misconceptions about what a man is not. Let's stop trying to squeeze our men into boxes God never intended. There is still honor in manhood, by living a life of integrity, caring, passion, courage and strength. These are the five essentials every man must possess to change his world. Our churches, our wives, our kids, our communities and our world desperately need strong men. Start your quest today to become the man who will carry the heavy weight of masculinity to a world that is desperate for men to step up. Now is the time to take your place as a man among men. Now is the time to prepare strong men for dangerous times.

"A beautifully written book, The Art of the Gut reads as easily as a fast-paced novel. Searching beyond the formal structures, regulations, and demographic counts associated with elections to consider the potential for one man to make a difference takes LeBlanc into an investigation of codes of masculinity in contemporary Japan as she studies how these men both employ and defy these codes in their political lives."—Jan Bardsley, Associate Professor, Japanese Humanities, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

From the ashes of war rose beauty, eroticism, and the promise of utopia. Ana Carden-Coyne investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States.