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Iron John: A Book About Men | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Bly
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $3.44
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New (44) Used (42) Collectible (5) from $3.44
Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 26598
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0306813769
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.31
EAN: 9780306813764
ASIN: 0306813769
Publication Date: July 27, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In this deeply learned book, poet and translator Robert Bly offers nothing less than a new vision of what it is to be a man.Bly's vision is based on his ongoing work with men and reflections on his own life. He addresses the devastating effects of remote fathers and mourns the disappearance of male initiation rites in our culture. Finding rich meaning in ancient stories and legends, Bly uses the Grimm fairy tale "Iron John," in which the narrator, or "Wild Man," guides a young man through eight stages of male growth, to remind us of archetypes long forgotten-images of vigorous masculinity, both protective and emotionally centered.Simultaneously poetic and down-to-earth, combining the grandeur of myth with the practical and often painful lessons of our own histories, Iron John is a rare work that will continue to guide and inspire men-and women-for years to come.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 78 more reviews...
 GURU AMONG MEN July 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Very important mythological view of man's psychic development May 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Inspiration in a Post-modern era May 10, 2008
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.
Some things in the life of man never change, nor should they. April 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Again, as he did in "The Sibling Society," the poet Robert Bly has written another much needed manifesto on the meaning of adulthood, appealing for a return to the celebration of unambiguous manhood. His reasons are clear: Neither men nor women benefit from blurring the distinctions between the sexes. Healthy male-female relationships per necessity require "whole members" of the opposite sex, not truncated or psychologically confused and mangled ones.
The reason for the differences is not just one of biology but also one in large part due to the way the sexes are socialized in preparation for adulthood. Neither girls nor boys become men and women simply by getting older and by growing body hair and breasts.
As it should be, arriving at healthy adulthood is necessarily a different process for men than it is for women. The process should still involve the same rituals that occur in every developing country of the world: Mentorship centered around myths of what it means to become a healthy, well-adjusted and productive adult. Women cannot teach men how to be men any more than men can teach women how to be women. This is not, nor can it be, nor should it be, a uni-sexual affair.
Ultimately growth to adulthood is a trek into the unknown in search of personal awareness: It can be a scary trial-and-error "random walk" to maturity as it is in the post-modern unisexual world, or it can be a guided tour through the world of many mysteries such as is the case in the world of Iron John, or a Carlos Castanada, or Siddhartha, or a Burno Bettelheim, or indeed a Joseph Campbell; or my favorite, Ernest Becker.
Why are guides needed on this journey? Because the main undertaking on the route to awareness involves the fear of how to approach the duality within us: Each end of the poles of our personality is frightening to the immature. The parts of ourselves that are most distant are also most unfamiliar and most fearful to the untutored mind.
Boys who are not yet men, but who possess the equipment and temperament, are not just scary creatures to everyone else, but most importantly, also to themselves. They are capable of the worse kind of inhumanness at one extreme and of the most sublime kind of gentleness at the other. There are no road maps written down on how we are to navigate these treacherous waters to get in touch with the many scary aspects of ourselves. Yet, to become adults, we must learn to navigate these waters. Indeed we must learn to "embrace" and "own" both ends of these poles.
But all of life is a struggle between managing the dialects between the different poles of our existence and between the different poles of the world outside our heads. A random walk, or trial and error is not the most efficacious way to embark on this journey, and certainly not the best way to complete it.
Bly, through allegory and fantasy shows us how caring societies do it, and have been doing it since time immemorial. He allows us to take the trek on a magic carpet: a ride with a guide. That way, the trip is not nearly as scary as going it alone, or worse, having society tell us "who we are not suppose to be," but not who we are.
Some things in the life of man never change, nor should they.
Ten Stars.
The kind of men we need March 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
One could argue a lot about the claims in this book. Does Robert over extend some of his claims about experience, myth, history, or any other number of premises and claims? To do that, however edifying it might seem at the time, is to miss the point of the work. Men are so lost that they don't even know that they are. Out of this, the world is just as lost. While women are finding their way (and Robert is excellent in respecting this) men-as-a-whole have lost theirs. Those that think they are preserving it are characturing manhood and those who think they transcend their gender are equally diservicing the world. Iron John is about identifying what makes a man manly in a way that is authentic to what the world needs of men and what we need from ourselves. One of the most important books on gender, ever, at a time that it is possibly need more than ever.
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