A blend of travel and memoir, discovery and self-discovery ... Fascinating and absorbing. It takes many forms: study, travelogue, guidebook, and warts-and-all self-portrait. McCarthy’s fieldwork is laudable ... The book is particularly compelling when McCarthy charts his own progress.
Shines in its more unvarnished portraits of the author’s own friends ... An agreeable companion on the page, Mr. McCarthy prefers scenic parkways to multilane highways and amusingly relies on a Rand McNally road atlas instead of phone-enabled navigation. The book’s thoughtful, minor-key moments can be savored for their middle-aged sensibility ... The book quotes men who take this theory, which predates the current men’s crisis, very seriously. But it doesn’t supply much evidence it’s true. Nor does it reckon with data on straight men’s growing acceptance of homosexuality or the role of technology in connecting and disconnecting people, or evidence of declining associational activities in general ... Several times he praises women for their much greater capacity for friendmaking and friendkeeping, but there is something wanting in his examination of men.
