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50
JUNE 2012
•
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
culture
COURTESY U.S. ARMY (STEIN)
JOURNALISMHAS ATTRACTED
its share of bare-knuckled,
rough-and-ready, running-with-the-bulls sorts of writers.
Time
humor columnist Joel Stein is not one of them. He
instead drives a yellowMini Cooper and is kind of afraid of
dogs. Most important, in his own words, he’s “the type of guy
who avoids conflict at all costs.”
Or was, that is, until his son’s birth a few years ago made Stein realize he wasn’t
prepared to raise a human being who might actually like “fighting and camping
and hunting and playing sports—stuff that to me seems nuts, but to your average
American male is just what you do for fun on the weekends,” he says. Stein’s
solution? A two-year odyssey into high-testosterone pursuits—detailed in his
recently released book,
Man Made: A
Stupid Quest for Masculinity
—that
would see him take the wheel of both
a $260,000 Lamborghini and a $6.2 mil-
lion Abrams tank, camp out with the
Boy Scouts and step into the ring with
a UFC champ, among other things.
More amazing than the fact that
Stein survived his exploits is that he
was allowed to try them at all. “The
amount of access that the armed ser-
vices gave me, especially, was insane,”
says Stein, who underwent both
Marine and Army boot camp training.
“That was easy compared with finding
someone who’d let me foster a dog.”
As he gets set to promote
Man Made
in a month containing that manliest of
holidays, Father’s Day, Stein predicts it
will appeal most to “guys like me, guys
who always wonder what it’d be like
to do the kinds of stuff I did.” But he
holds out hope that, ahem, “real men”
will also give it a look. “When you’re
into something and you see someone
who knows nothing about it trying it,
it’s hysterical,” he says. “I think they’re
the least likely to read the book—but
would enjoy it the most.”
out now
Manning Up
Awi y newmemoir details one writer’s a empts
to re-masculate himself
MOVIES
Prometheus
, a Ridley Scott–directed prequel of sorts to
Alien
//
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
, a behind-the-scenes
look at the Serbian performance artist’s 2010 retrospective at MoMA
BOOKS
The Risk Agent
, the latest international thriller from
bestselling author Ridley Pearson
//
Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ’n’ Roll
, Marc Dolan’s authoritative take on the life and
times of The Boss
TV
The Season 5 premiere of HBO’s vampire soap opera,
“
True Blood
”
MUSIC
Kin
, by alt-country troubadour
Rodney Crowell in collaboration with writer Mary Karr, featuring Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Norah Jones and Roseanne Cash
//
Analog Man
, the first solo album in 20 years from Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh
//
Overexposed
, by pop-rockers Maroon 5
Power Trio
Joel Stein’s take on some of
history’s manliest men
Genghis Khan:
“Not only did the
13th-century Mongol conquer
the largest contiguous empire in
history, but—due to his harem
of thousands of women—there are now 16
million men (and probably that many women
too) who have his DNA.”
Chesty Puller:
“When I was in
boot camp with the Marines, I kept
hearing about thisWorldWar II
hero, the most decoratedMarine
in history, who said things like ‘They are in
front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on
both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us
29 to 1.
They can’t get away from us now!
’”
Theodore Roosevelt:
“I hope
my nearly-as-spoiled, nearly-as-
asthmatic son grows up to pursue
the ‘strenuous life’ by becoming a cowboy,
sheriff, grizzly bear hunter, judo practitioner
and the kind of guy who gets shot at the
beginning of a speech and finishes it anyway.”
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GRUNTWORK
Joel Stein hits the
obstacle course at
Army boot camp