A compassionate act drives a young single mother in Arkansas to the forefront of America’s fight against AIDS in this “powerful” memoir (Library Journal). In 1986, twenty-six-year-old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies—often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state. Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis. This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America. Praise for All the Young Men A Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award One of Library Journal’s Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2020 “Burks’s spirited, straightforward prose balances the heartbreak of her story with just enough humor and toughness. A must-read for anyone interested in narratives of front-line responses to the early AIDS crisis as well as personal accounts of kindness and determination.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Burks’ vivid memories of ‘my guys’ and the trials she endured fighting against prejudice offer a portrait of courageous compassion that is both rare and inspiring . . . [A] deeply moving, meaningful book.” —Kirkus Reviews “Anecdotes of small-town gay bars and drag queen rivalries add levity to tales of hardship and sacrifice—crosses set ablaze on her lawn, her young daughter ostracized at school. . . . This worthy account offers as much bitter as sweet.” —Publishers Weekly

Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him. Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised. Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: “The terrifying story of the worst disaster in the history of the US Forest Service’s elite Smokejumpers.” —Kirkus Reviews A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in this extraordinary book. Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write—includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul. “A moving account of humanity, nature, and the perseverance of the human spirit.” —Library Journal “Haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal “Engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly

The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation

Anthropology is particularly well suited to explore the contemporary predicament in the coming of age of young men. Its grounded and comparative empiricism provides the opportunity to move beyond statistics, moral panics, or gender stereotypes in order to explore specific aspects of life course transitions, as well as the similar or divergent barriers or opportunities that young men in different parts of the world face. Yet, effective contextualization and comparison cannot be achieved by looking at male youths in isolation. This volume undertakes to contextualize male youths’ circumstances and to learn about their lives, perspectives, and actions, and in turn illuminates the larger structures and processes that mediate the experiences entailed in becoming young men. The situation of male youths provides an important vantage point from which to consider broader social transformations and continuities. By paying careful attention to these contexts, we achieve a better understanding of the current influences encountered and acted upon by young people.

Across the world, we see an explosion of unpredictable violence committed by alienated young men. Jamil Jivani recounts his experiences working as a youth activist throughout North America and the Middle East, drawing striking parallels between ISIS recruits, gangbangers, and Neo-Nazis in the West. Having narrowly escaped a descent into crime and gang violence in his native Toronto, Jivani has devoted his life to helping other at-risk youths avoid this fate in cities across North America. After the Paris terrorist attacks of 2016, he traveled to Europe and the Middle East to assist Muslim community outreach groups focused on deterring ISIS recruitment. Why Young Men is the story of Jivani’s education as an activist on the front lines of one of today’s most dangerous and intractable problems: the explosion of violence among angry young men throughout the world. Jivani relates his personal story and describes his entrance into the community outreach movement, his work with disenfranchised people of color in North America and at-risk youth in the Middle East and Africa, and his experiences with the white working class. The reader learns along with him as he profiles a diverse array of young men and interviews those who are trying to help them, drawing parallels between these groups, refuting the popular belief that they are radically different from each other, and offering concrete steps toward countering this global trend.

This book explores navigations of contemporary masculinities amongst young, advantaged men living in Australia and Germany. Taking an intersectional approach, the book argues that more open, egalitarian forms of masculinity, such as caring masculinities, are fostered by marginalised groups. Elliott investigates ways in which privileged men can move towards this openness alongside ongoing expressions of more traditional or regressive masculinity. Drawing on interviews, the book explores these navigations and the ways in which they are bound up with themes such as work, mobility, relationships, the privileges and pressures of masculinities, and the contradictions and difficulties of masculinities under neoliberalism. What is revealed is the need for change at individual, collective and structural levels, with care and openness amongst men as a means of achieving this change. Young Men Navigating Contemporary Masculinities will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as sociology, gender studies, critical studies on men and masculinities, and cultural studies.

Meet Matthew, Rez, Cocker, and Kearney. They've just finished school, and are facing the great void of the future, celebrating their freedom in this unpromising adult reality with self-obliteration. They roam through Dublin, their only aims the next drink, the next high, and a callow, fearful idea of sex. Kearney, in particular, pushes boundaries in a way that once made him a leader in the group, but increasingly an object of fear. When a trip to the U.S. turns Kearney's violent fantasies ever darker, the other boys are forced to face both the violence within themselves and the limits of their own indifference. Here Are the Young Men portrays a spiritual fallout, harbinger of the collapse of national illusion in "Celtic Tiger" Ireland. Visceral and chilling, this debut novel marks the arrival of a formidable literary talent, channeling an unnerving anarchic energy to devastating effect.

A riveting history of the daring politicians who challenged the disastrous policies of the British government on the eve of World War II On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons began perhaps the most crucial debate in British parliamentary history. On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government and also of Britain—indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson's fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government's defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe's tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister's resignation. Some historians dismiss the "phony war" that preceded this turning point—from September 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany, to May 1940, when Winston Churchill became prime minister—as a time of waiting and inaction, but Olson makes no such mistake, and describes in dramatic detail the public unrest that spread through Britain then, as people realized how poorly prepared the nation was to confront Hitler, how their basic civil liberties were being jeopardized, and also that there were intrepid politicians willing to risk political suicide to spearhead the opposition to Chamberlain—Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Leo Amery, Ronald Cartland, and Lord Robert Cranborne among them. The political and personal dramas that played out in Parliament and in the nation as Britain faced the threat of fascism virtually on its own are extraordinary—and, in Olson's hands, downright inspiring.

Author Aaron Kipnis was arrested and jailed for the first time at age 11 and he spent the next seven years of his life in and out of jail and living on the streets. He is now a respected psychologist specializing in male psychology. In Bad Boys he tells his own story, writing from the perspective of an expert devoted to helping boys and young men, including a number of suggestions for alternatives to the current youth corrections system.