Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America. - Review - book review

Adolescence, Spring, 1998

CANADA, Geoffrey. Reaching Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. l60pp. $22.00 (h).

Geoffrey Canada lays out the little-understood history of drugs and their marketing to inner-city boys and takes a hard look at the issue of too-early sex, showing the reader, through a pointed story of his own sexual education on the streets, how the combination of age-old urges with new cultural forces and mores has created a volatile sexual terrain for boys. Canada writes of the young boy he once was and of the crucial issues--fatherhood, healing, mentors, self-esteem, faith, and more--that must be negotiated as boys in America reach up for manhood.