Because publishers are idiots, the wall of women's studies books at Elliott Bay Book Company is a shockingly bright shade of pink. "Because," you can imagine the marketing departments reasoning, "girls won't know if a book is about girly stuff unless it's pink." If you spend any amount of time dipping into the enormous and somewhat insulting pinkness, you'll find serious books about the deplorable state of women's rights in various countries around the world, and humorous books about body image, and just about any female-centric topic you can imagine. But lurking over in the corner of the women's studies section, cancerlike, are a couple of shelves of old, floppy, forgotten books. Most of them are brown and are either by Robert Bly or about shaving.
This is the men's studies section.
It's not surprising that there are so few books about manhood and manliness, or that so few people are reading them. For one thing: Maleness has been the default category in American culture forever. For another thing: Reading about a privileged group isn't very interesting. And in general, reading is not considered to be an especially masculine trait. Very few writers can write about manhood without sounding like a Tucker Max–style douche. Which is why it would be a misstep for just about any writer except Michael Chabon to write a men's studies book called Manhood for Amateurs. It's hard to imagine anyone but the universally adored, tremendously popular author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union approaching a book about manhood without becoming some kind of hairy-man laughingstock.
Chabon's prose is as ornate as ever:
The baby popped off the breast, and sighed, and considered one of the anemone wisps of drifting smoke, like the aftermath of a bursting skyrocket, that I imagined his thoughts to resemble. At seven days he gave evidence of a melancholy or even mournful nature. He sighed again, and so I sighed, thinking that we were about to confirm, in the worst possible way, all the lugubrious ideas about the world that he already seemed to have formed.
His thoughtfulness makes Manhood stand out from the men's studies crowd. Chabon doesn't traffic in clichés about men and women being from different planets and men needing a poker night in their man caves to talk about football and bond. Instead, he unveils a series of meditations about what it means to be a father and a son and a brother and a reader of comic books and a half-hearted collector of baseball cards. It's a shame to think of this book moldering away in the corner, surrounded by mediocre texts. But that won't happen; Chabon has the power to elevate an entire genre just by contributing a single book. 
