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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: $3.48
You Save: $11.52 (77%)
New (42) Used (36) Collectible (6) from $3.48
Rating:  86 reviews
Sales Rank: 22192
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
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
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: different cover art in great shape with minor use and wear
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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 81 more reviews...
Iron John helps men identify the voids in their reality November 23, 2008
David B. Boggs (Qatar)
I am writing this 1/2 way through the book, but so far I am impressed with Bly's ability to tie the meaning behind ancient fairy tales and traditions which bound men and boys together with the social ills that result today from the lack of these ties. I found the book really struck a resounding chord for me, perhaps moreso because I was raised by my mother and grandmother in a fatherless household until the age of ten. The book helped me understand some things about myself that I had not realized and led to some productive self-reflection.
Iron John November 3, 2008
Mr. Grant A. Cox
Iron John is a good book in the sense that it is willing to say things that might not be popular. I thought that much of the book was reaching a little, but some ideas were right on the money. For example, i couldn't agree more with the parts about a boy having to steal the key to manhood from under his mother's pillow. a mother would prefer her boys stay boys forever. other parts, about having to be in touch with nature for a man to be a man in the old tradition was a little lacking. i think the author loves the outdoors therefor if you want to be a man in his eyes you have to like the outdoors as well. worth reading, but dont think it is going to change your life or anything.
 Thought Provoking October 27, 2008
Cole (CA.)
Bly finds in "Iron John" the universal themes of men and their development. A mans life is usually not pretty or just. He struggles throughout and endures much suffering. It almost appears that the rough trail defines a part of manhood. It seems harder today for men to honestly find a garden that hasn't been spoiled by politically correct thinking or bias. The Universities that once fostered free thinking have had to defend themselves for their openness. I find Adult Ed. courses to be the best, under the radar, classes for cultivating in a walled garden. It's ashame public education has become so out of touch with the needs of boys and young male adolescents. Bly taps into the buried psyche of men with his discussions about descent and grief, the King and the God-Woman. This book helps men understand their wounds better as well as their fathers.
GURU AMONG MEN July 10, 2008
Richard Moore
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
D. Riverblue Cloudwalker (California)
3 out of 3 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.
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