CHOICE reviews Disarming Manhood

April 2006

Richards teaches law at NYU, but this volume is only tangentially related to law. His unusual and fascinating book is concerned with ethical and moral matters. More precisely, with the lives of five famous men: William Lloyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and somewhat surprisingly, Winston Churchill. Richards connects the men through their mutual resistance to the traditional sense of male honor, which holds that a man should respond with vehemence and even violence to any insult. These five men resisted this traditional response in favor of making ethically reasoned stands against those individuals and institutions that create and promote social injustice through violence. Richards explains that all of these men were unusually close to the primary maternal figure in their lives, women who possessed strong and ethical personal religions. The author claims, with considerable support and thorough scholarship, that these formative relationships motivated four of his subjects to confront violence-based injustice with civil disobedience. The obvious exception is Churchill, who determined that in this instance, nonviolence would have failed utterly and completely due to the unbridled and untempered violence that informs fascist regimes. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.

CHOICE
April 2006