Fire in the Belly is here on Amazon

Quote from the book "there are two questions that a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I Going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble."

My thoughts and review

This book was published in 1991 so it is more than 30 years old. That is important.

The Author was born in 1931 in America and this is something of note. I think that his early formative years were quite different than the times we are in now. And this is reflected in his writing and in this book.

He talks a lot about his younger years and the expectations of being a man. There is a lot about fighting, machismo, fisticuffs and masculinity. I didn't live through those years but It is easy to understand that the role of being a man and manhood was quite different in those decades. The world was different, gender roles were more clearly defined and the needs/expectations of men were quite differently defined. Think about it. He was in his teens when world war 2 broke out.

The world has changed a lot since then. The roles of men and women have changed quite a bit within our culture, workplace, and home.

That doesn't mean that this book is wrong or irrelevant. I think what we have here is a leading edge kind of thing. The author was seeing the world and the role of men change and he wrote about it.

There is a lot of wonderful analysis of men, how they/we think and how we fit into this world, particularly in a spiritual and philosophical sense; which I really like.

Relatable? Well, this is a bit of a different story. The writer, if you check out his bio, ended up living an affluent upper crust kind of life. He attended both Harvard and Princeton. And he did things like PBS specials and got publishing deals with top name publishers. So I think that he ended up being detached from what an average man lives.

The book is good, and thought provoking. And you will extract some valuable stuff from it. As an example he talks a lot about rituals in life and how different cultures have different rituals as a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. Some cultures even assign a boy a new name as part of the ritual into manhood. I love this stuff.

• The Author's Website (Sam Keen)
• Short bio and bibliography of Sam Keen on Wikipedia