Synopses & Reviews
The bracingly honest memoir of a star athlete who lived with a brain tumor that flooded his body with female hormones and sent him into a sexual netherworld from which he would emerge with insights about sexuality and manhood few could imagine.
On the surface, Ken Baker seemed a model man. He was a nationally ranked hockey goalie; girls threw themselves at him; fans cheered him. Inside, though, he didn't feel like a "man." Baker found that despite his attraction to women, he had little sex drive and even less of a sex life. To his anguish, he repeatedly found himself unable to perform sexually. Despite strenuous workouts, his body remained flabby and soft.
In his eventual career as a Hollywood correspondent for People, Baker found himself challenged and tormented by the sexually charged atmosphere of Tinseltown. His relations with women fractured. Physically, matters would grow more bizarre as he would one day find himself lactating.
The macho culture that reared Baker made it agonizingly difficult for him to seek help. But he would eventually learn that he was suffering from a rare brain tumor that flooded his body with massive amounts of a female hormone. Six hours of brain surgery would accomplish what years of therapy, rumination, and denial could not. Finally, Ken Baker would be able to feel-and function-like a man.
At a moment of heated debate over nature versus nurture, Man Made like no other book illuminates the biochemical nature of sexuality. Moreover, it is a fascinating chronicle of growing up sexually as a male in America-and a profound recollection of the pain that accompanies sexual dysfunction in our postsexual-revolution culture.
Review
"In an era when Viagra pills and testosterone gel have made male sexuality indeed manhood itself look like a mere commodity to be purchased, Ken Baker's Man Made is a bracingly honest account of his own far more difficult and fascinating journey to manhood. He takes the reader with him through a labyrinth of medical mystery, emotional distress, and startling humor. Raucous at one moment, tender at the next, Man Made is always a triumph of candor and a vital inquiry into the essence of male identity." Samuel G. Freedman, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Jew vs. Jew
Review
"Baker has crafted a penetrating, even haunting look at what it means to be a man, and what it should mean. Enlivened by a stunningly brilliant chronicle of a tragically unhappy childhood, Baker's book is an object lesson in how to survive an upbringing that would have killed a lesser man, and more than that, a story of not just survival, but triumph." Ben Stein
Review
A triumph of candor and a vital inquiry into the essence of male identity. (Samuel G. Freedman, author of The Inheritance)