Description: "This tremendously readable and engaging book goes against the grain of our political culture. It is a defense of adventure and of a definition of masculinity stressing the element of adventure in a culture that has become increasingly hostile to these values (though they survive, at least in attenuated form, in our popular culture). It needs to be read not just as a contribution to literary scholarship but as a contribution to public debate about the place of heroism in a democratic society, the prospects for adventure in a post-imperialist world, the relative merits of an aesthetic versus a moral and religious view of experience, the strengths and weaknesses of academic culture and university education, the promise and threat of feminism, and other important issues." --Christopher Lasch, University of Rochester

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