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.