Reviews for Iron John

The average rating for Iron John based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-06-10 00:00:00 Theresa Souza Having just pushed through the deep lakes of thought Bly makes us dwell in, and having exhausted a lot of energy traveling miles and miles of metaphor I feel short of power to describe this book. I can say that I am, and few would disagree, the least among you to be found in a drum circle, or even drinking starbuck's. Which is not to say that I am better, only more stubborn about these things. And now further admitting my manhood is not at all comfortable with the idea of needing a "men's movement" and winces at the very thought. Now, having admitted both above to for your consideration I wish to say only that this book is not what I thought it would be, and I am deeply grateful for that. It is not a manifesto, or a self help instructional, nor commentary passing as self-aggrandizement. It is not an attack (backhanded or otherwise) at women--though I can understand why some modern thinking mothers may feel it is--in fact I felt too often he wasted repeated qualifying line after qualifying line for the sole sake of comforting his women readers, soon to be attackers. in any case, despite his verbosity he has a genuine richness of mind and spirit and perhaps his real gift is to free men to think in myth again. Perhaps in time the true value of this meandering philosophical work will be revealed as stealing back some wonder and mysticism in an age of reason. humans love metaphors because most things that mean anything are not so tame as to fit into a single word. Witness the blandness of the word love, or hate, or orgasm when compared to the complexity and depth of the actual thing. And the metaphor is often the closest an author can get to the real thing in written form, and in many ways its the closest some of us can come to painful parts of ourselves. Through this perhaps Bly has found a language for self interaction that free's us from the clinician lurking within us. Gone are terms like Self Esteem or Ego or confidence and in come the king, and the warriors who protect them and perhaps we find we still have some fight left in us. Perhaps, freed from science we can use imagination to bridge an otherwise uncrossable divide between where we are and where we need to be. Bly hands us this and I think it is on us resist its complexity, and our desire to consume it. It's on us to allow it to sink in and become part of our vocabulary for visualizing the world, and ourselves.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-09-19 00:00:00 Christopher Karow Oh, man. We all know how it's said that we can't judge books by their covers, or at least that we shouldn't...but this book can be judged easily with a quick glance at the back cover. Here is the author. Note the "ethnic" vest over the button-up shirt and velvet ascot. This sums up, metaphorically, my experience of the contents of the book. A little bit hippie, a little bit new-age fetishist, a little bit ladies-man-of-the-1970's...and a little bit straightlaced and conservative underneath it all. So, he's basically promoting the male version of the "bleeding warriors of peace" women who paint murals of pregnant goddesses growing out of trees. I tried really hard to give this book a fair chance. After all, Robert Bly has taken the time to suggest that men are alienated from their masculine natures and that this condition is bad for everybody. I can get behind that. But I just can't tolerate sentences like "Men and women alike once called on men to pierce the dangerous places, carry handfuls of courage to the waterfalls, dust the tails of the wild boars". WTF? "Dusting" the tails of pigs?