A Review of Ronald Brown’s Memoirs of a Modern-Day Drifter
(2013, Bookstand Publishing, ISBN: 978-1-61863-517-4; http://www.bookstandpublishing.com/book_details/Memoirs_of_a_Modernday_Drifter) By Joey Madia [Disclaimer: Ronald Brown has studied creative writing with me for 3 years. I served as editor on this book from concept to final draft] What it means to be a man has continually evolved in the past 70 or so years. In many ways, the Marlboro man image has lost its power—men who are too aggressive, too take-charge, too, well, manly, have come to be seen as an artifact of a less enlightened time. Robert Bly’s Iron John and the Fire in the Belly movement rose in the late eighties and early nineties as the old models of manhood began to crumble and the male of our species began to come untethered from many of the guiding principles that served my father’s and his father’s generations. Don’t get me wrong—there’s a fine line between being a strong man and being an overly controlling, argumentative, and just plain violent...