“The past sixty years have seen radical changes in the roles and expectations of men in our society.  In this engaging book which reads like a letter to a friend, sociologist and social-work researcher Irwin Epstein explores what it’s been like for him to be a man in the twentieth and twenty-first century through his loving and not-so-loving recollections of male friends and the way each of them has affected his life. Flawed though they all are, you can’t help wishing you’d known each of them. This is an honest yet witty reflection by an admittedly imperfect, hopefully non-misogynist and by chance alone heterosexual man on what it’s been like to be a man, an academic and a single father in the tumultuous environment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  Not just for men alone, it indirectly encourages women to re-think the meaning of gender, friendship and of the way they live in their lives as well.”