Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World

Western civilization has no more eloquent defender than Anthony Esolen, a man who has counted the cost, and paid it, of leading the way in that defense. Following on his compelling prior volume, Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity, Professor Esolen returns, this time in defense of boys and an experience of boyhood that is on the wane, if not extinguished in many quarters of the modern world—and to illuminate the threats our precious sons face from harridans, harpies, and all purveyors and promoters of political correctness and of the misguided and ultimately doomed-though not before it has done much mischief-project of blurring the distinctions between boys and girls.
 
Drawing on his own, in many ways all-American boyhood, Esolen, at times wistfully, at times, playfully, and at times prophetically—in the literal sense of employing the thunder of an Old Testament prophet, details what a good boyhood once was and what it can be again. He does so in chapters inspiringly titled:
 
The Arena to Enter
Brothers to Gather
Mountains to Climb
The Man to Follow
Work to Do
Songs to Sing
Enemies to Slay
Life to Give

 
Anthony Esolen prescribes a return to sanity to an insane world. He may not be able to change the world, but enter into the world of boyhood with him and he just might change you and the lives of the boys you love.
 

• Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child
• Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
• Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World
• Christus Vincit: Christ's Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age
• The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord
• The Day Is Now Far Spent
• Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child
• The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity
• Theology of Home: Finding the Eternal in the Everyday
• Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within