cover image Mama's Boy: 9the True Story of a Serial Killer and His Mother

Mama's Boy: 9the True Story of a Serial Killer and His Mother

Richard T. Pienciak. Dutton Books, $24.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-525-93851-4

Hunting, ""one of the chief defining images of manhood,"" shapes the modern male psyche, justifying images of masculinity biologically rooted in aggression, violence and conquest, asserts Bergman. Over the millennia, ""Males hunt. Females gather,"" and this division of labor, he argues, defined behavior for the sexes as the hunt took on an erotic flavor, teaching men how to experience desire and creating ""an identity for the hunter"" based on power, male bonding and domination. Although Bergman, an English professor at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state, gives a nod to the alternate hypothesis that early man was a fruit- and vegetable-eating scavenger, not a hunter, this rhapsodic cultural history of hunting--from Greek heroic myths of Orion the night stalker to medieval spiritual allegories, Shakespeare, James Fenimore Cooper, Faulkner and Norman Mailer--seems tailor-made for disciples of the men's movement. An exhausting, windy, overblown glorification of the chase, it mingles Bergman's personal adventures--hunting whales with Eskimos, visiting prehistoric painted caves in Spain, etc.--with observations by Ortega y Gasset and Plato, Boy Scout and frontier lore and profiles of hunters such as Davy Crockett, Theodore Roosevelt and British Victorian elephant slaughterer Frederick Selous. (July)