LIVING IN AN ERA OF 40 Y.O. MEN READING ABOUT MILEY CYRUS

Gary Cross, a professor of history, makes firmer connections in Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity (Columbia Univ., $29.50). Cross slides through 20th-century culture in loping, eloquent paragraphs. He gives us informed wryness -- as when he observes that the patron saint of modern manhood has morphed from Cary Grant (mature) to Hugh Grant (not) -- and then tells us what it means. We've rejected the Victorian patriarch without finding a suitable substitute, he says, and "youth is no longer a stage of life but a 'refuge' from the now tangled and obscured path to maturity." Woven between indictments of our youth-centric media and cultural decay is the observation that pitting women against men in a war of rights -- and of "defining the victim" -- has rendered male baby boomers unable to put on a strong, masculine face for their offspring.

-Washinton Post
Sept 13 2008