Man Made: A Memoir of My Body

by Ken Baker

Book Overview

On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally ranked hockey goalie; a Hollywood correspondent for People; a guest-lister at celebrity parties; and girls came on to him. Inside,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585420832
• ISBN13: 9781585420834
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Tarcher
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

This Book Changed My Life

As a man diagnosed with the same malady as the author, reading about someone who had endured the same misery as myself was both shocking and reassuring. Ken Baker describes his journey in compelling and sometimes painfully honest prose. His description of a descent into a torturous abyss is rivaled only by his ascent from the very depths of despair. Most of my family and closests friends have read this book and have a new found understanding for the hell some of us have endured. Mr. Baker's book is a worthy example of the power of the human spirit.

Honest,refreshing, humbling

Ken Baker's Man Made takes you into the world of a boy searching for his own manhood in a world that tries to dictate it for him. It is well written. Humor is peppered throughout what was a tormenting experience for the author. It is about a disease but it is not a book about being sick, but rather a book about living and overcoming the obstacles life presents.

Man Made: A Memoir

I could not put this book down. The writing is superb, the story truly amazing. What an incredible story told so well.

A very good read!

I really enjoyed this book. On one level Man Made is a psychological and sociological memoir. More importantly however, it's just a plain old good read-- as entertaining as it is thought provoking. In a natural, anecdotal and seemingly effortless style, the author tells the tale of his journey through boyhood and into early adulthood, while simultaneously bringing the reader along on a spiraling tumble into a crisis of health, self-awareness, manhood and humanity. The author shares some valuable and unique insights into gender rolls, manhood in modern America, and the way that we all interact with and view one another, and ourselves, as men and women. A well written, compelling story about what happens when the body becomes one's own worst enemy. Man Made is an all-around good read-- I recommend that anyone pick it up.

Brilliant, searing and witty

Ken Baker's Man Made is an honest, insightful look at the author's struggle to define himself as a man -- a struggle complicated by an undiagnosed pituitary tumor and made even more interesting by the fact that he was a star athlete living a very "macho" existence. Baker's book has universal themes of identity, sexuality, and self-discovery that he packages in a highly readable, briskly paced and ultimately very poignant memoir. The book raises timely issues about whether it is nature or nurture that makes us behave and think the way we do. How biologically proscribed is manhood, or is it merely a cultural construct?A must-read that will appeal to anyone who's ever wondered about what makes you "you." .