Reviews for Who needs friends : an unscientific examination of male friendship across america
Publishers Weekly
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Bestselling travel writer McCarthy (Walking with Sam) offers a heartwarming meditation on male friendship. A pointed question from his son—“You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?”—inspires the author to reconsider his “self-induced isolation” and set out on cross-country drive to reconnect with former close friends. Over the course of a sprawling journey from Appalachia to the Southwest, McCarthy not only rekindles his relationships but makes impromptu, thematically appropriate stops—like at a museum dedicated to lonesome musical legend Roy Orbison—and, most intriguingly, chats with men he meets in bars and other hangouts about their friendships or lack thereof. He encounters several sets of lifelong best friends (including Mississippi duo Chuck and Dan, whose grandfathers were also best friends) and a slew of alienated loners (“I stick to myself,” one construction worker explains). These surprisingly open conversations allow McCarthy to interrogate what blocks male connection, particularly men’s fear of vulnerability and their sense that it’s easier to be emotional with women. McCarthy’s journey exposes how infrequently friendship is discussed at all in American culture—as one journalist notes, “People are reluctant to discuss friendship because it has no immediacy, no monetary value”—even as there is a widespread hunger to talk about it. The result is a poignant, life-affirming look at American men yearning for closer bonds. (Mar.)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
An exploration of male friendship and the difficulties of connection. Actor-turned-author McCarthy, now in his 60s, begins with a comment from a young son who says, offhandedly, “You don’t really have any friends, do you, Dad?” McCarthy thinks, well, he has friends, but he doesn’t see them often. The resolve, then, that drives this narrative was to go seek out friends from his hell-raising, bibulous youth and beyond, driving up and down and across the continent to check in. One visit was to a man he called his “surrogate big brother,” who had fallen on hard times, psychically speaking; though that old friend waved him off, McCarthy drove the many miles to see him all the same, to find him living as a hoarder with boxes everywhere that explained, McCarthy gamely writes, “how Jeff Bezos became a billionaire.” A modest intervention ensues before McCarthy pushes on. Friends can be as numerous as one wishes, but they require investment: McCarthy cites a study that conjectures that “it takes two hundred hours to make a good friend.” Making is one thing, keeping quite another: He marvels at an encounter in a Texas diner with a group of women who meet for lunch every Wednesday and have for time immemorial, which causes him to wonder, “Why are women just so much better at this?” The answers are various. McCarthy notes, near the end of his narrative, that while he’s met many men who have had friends for decades, he has also met “men who have no male friends at all, who can’t even conceive of the idea.” McCarthy finds hope for those friendless men when he concludes that those with whom he’s spoken allow that they’d “just never talked about this before” and might ponder doing something about it. Thoughtful and well written—and a good prompt to call an old friend. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
