Iron John: A Book About Men

Iron John: A Book About Men

By: Robert Bly  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Release Date: 2004-07-27

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Iron John - Iron John is a good book in the sense that it is willing to say things that might not be popular. I thought that much of the book was reaching a little, but some ideas were right on the money. For example, i couldn't agree more with the parts about a boy having to steal the key to manhood from under his mother's pillow. a mother would prefer her boys stay boys forever. other parts, about having to be in touch with nature for a man to be a man in the old tradition was a little lacking. i think the author loves the outdoors therefor if you want to be a man in his eyes you have to like the outdoors as well. worth reading, but dont think it is going to change your life or anything.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Thought Provoking - Bly finds in "Iron John" the universal themes of men and their development. A mans life is usually not pretty or just. He struggles throughout and endures much suffering. It almost appears that the rough trail defines a part of manhood. It seems harder today for men to honestly find a garden that hasn't been spoiled by politically correct thinking or bias. The Universities that once fostered free thinking have had to defend themselves for their openness. I find Adult Ed. courses to be the best, under the radar, classes for cultivating in a walled garden. It's ashame public education has become so out of touch with the needs of boys and young male adolescents. Bly taps into the buried psyche of men with his discussions about descent and grief, the King and the God-Woman. This book helps men understand their wounds better as well as their fathers.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
GURU AMONG MEN - Robert Bly is a modern day Carl Sandberg. Iron John was on the Top 10 Best sellers list. This is one of my favorite books and I highly recommend it for young boys, men, and women with children that have no father at home! In todays society dysfunctional families are at an all time high and "Iron John" can furnish helpful and insightful information. I really enjoyed the metaphors and mythology; "The lad leaned over and looked into the smooth and reflective pond water and didn't see his own reflection but that of three female wolves looking over his shoulder." The lad lived at home with no father or brothers but with his mother and two sisters and had no identify of his own.

Highly recommend anything on or about Robert E. Howard (1906-1936)The Best of the Best writer/poet ever. Must Reads = Blood & Thunder, The Life & Art of REH by Mark Finn, The Last of the Trunk by Paul Herman of REH Foundation and Selected Letters of REH by Rob Roehm of REH Foundation, One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price, The Dark Barbarian & The Barbaric Triumph by Don Herron, Solomon Kane, Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, The Last of the Frontier, Lord Samarcand, and anything of Weird Works and Weird Tales by Greenberg, Life After Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, The Star Rover by Jack London, and my favorite The Beast from the Abyss about cats, I Am A Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and The Best of H.P. Lovecraft.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Very important mythological view of man's psychic development - This book performs the very valuable function of providing a critique on the obstacles posed to men's development by our modern society, which Bly feels has gradually become closed towards mythical consciousness since 1000 AD. Actually, similar problems exist for women in our lives and development, when society fails to provide us the myths and stories, and the wise women to guide us, and Jungian authors such as Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion WOodman have addressed women's issues this way. Robert Bly is doing the same for men, and I love his book. I consider it a travesty of narrowness that any feminists would oppose the wholeness of men and attack Bly or Iron John because Bly calls for men to integrate their dark, hairy side. Women also need to integrate our dark side! Our social rejection of these shadow qualities is forcing them underground where they will inevitably explode out. We must all, men and women both, resist those powers in the world which would deny us our own soul and our own wholeness. Mythology greatly assists in this task.
One of the most important critiques Bly makes is that modern men are growing up without adequate fathering and particularly without any adequate form of initiation into manhood, and that this problem has gotten worse since the Industrial Revolution when fathers stopped working in the fields and in trades, and went away to work in factories, where their sons couldn't see them work and didn't know or sometimes believe that their fathers contributed anything valuable to the world. Thus Industrial & Technological society placed a rift between fathers and sons. It is likewise true, as the whole realm of ecopsychology also suppports, that not just men but women too suffer from the separation from earth and work with the hands.
The point Bly makes about young men not being provided proper initiation into manhood is EXTREMELY important, and it's just this issue which we see at work in the phenomenon of urban gangs, where young men are basically trying to intitiate each other into manhood, only in a terribly immature and meaningless "Lord of the Flies" way, e.g such as by implying that if you commit such and such a crime, you're a man. Public schools in my view fail young men because they are archetypally more mothering than fathering, and without adequate fathering, young men act out, and no suprise, violence in our schools is a huge problem that's only increasing. Bly says that 20 to 30 percent of young men are growing up in homes without fathers. That's devastating for their development, and also for the rest of us, since young men without direction tend to be much more outwardly destructive than young women (young women, as many women, tend more often to turn their destructive tendencies inward, against themselves)
To appreciate this book it will be necessary that the reader appreciates mythology and our psyche's need for it. Not all will take this perspective or even understand this view. In this area, reading a book about the importance of mythology, such as Campbell's The Power of Myth or Rollo May's The Cry for Myth, or Larsen's The Mythic Imagination, will help provide an orientation to the basic perspectives of Iron John and Jungian-Archetypal psychology.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Inspiration in a Post-modern era - This book has inspired me to grieve and to take grieving seriously. To look at the darker side of my personality, my naivete my repressed anger and to take that seriously as well. There have been many critics of this work from the post-modern and post-structural camp when the book intitially came out. I appreciate much of post-modern theory but this controversy for me revealed the real darker side of post-modernism. That is to say Bly writes a work that inspires men from such a diverse background, black, white, hispanic, gay, straight, conservative, liberal, religious, atheist etc. that he is truly a writer who has been able to write both openly and specifically a truely pluralist writer and a complete surprize that he has been able to pull it off. For the most part the post-modern criticism of the work can be summed up as a shallow, cynical, fear of emotion and depth, and fear of men and masculinity. I give the work Five stars, however being I also appreciate post-modern critique offer a different point of view with my praise. Bly's work too has a darkside or rather may have a shadow effect on those that read it when they assume that the archetypal forms are "universal" when only the energies behind those forms are. The form itself is never. Bly attempts to discriminate "between the layers" while remaining poetic, but in this case I would have appreciated the work to be equally academic as poetic - because what is at stake is a misunderstanding of Jungian theory and Jung or Von Franz's nuances. That said my only real objection is that not more books have been written that pay equal respect to men's emotional lives while challenging Bly's position. There are sadly very few! And none to my knowledge from the post-modernists or post-structuralists perspective - which gives us a clue that perhaps we today may need to appreciate that a 'grand narrative' is not merely some plot to normalize the masses or have one conform to an ideology, but a conveinent tool to help people share their most private lives with one another, where multiple perspectives are sure to arise. If Iron John doesn't fit a person's life at the moment we have many many more myths, fairytales, stories, and poems to choose from. Deconstructive cynicism or subversion can only go so far, when we realize there are forces that animate our lives other than who we believe our "self" to be. We inevitably give these vitalities names and want to know what makes them vital. Bly gives "it" a name or names and has opened a discussion that will last generations. My only hope is Bly's work does not chrystalize into yet another dogma to soon - then another man will have to go out into the dark woods ALONE - perhaps the only way to keep a work like this alive is if WE do so, and do so seriously, earnestly and with a good sense of humor.

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