Midlifeman: A Book for Guys and the Women Who Want to Understand Them

Midlifeman is Larry Krotz's term for men in their forties, men who've just realized that their old school friends are now - gasp! - running things; that it's now or never to achieve their ambitions; that middle age is almost here. A generation of men who, until they passed the mark, thought that thirty was over the hill.
These are men whose children are almost adults themselves, whose parents are elderly and in greater need of their support than ever before, who have one or two marriages under their belts, and whose careers seem to have plateaued.
Midlife, Krotz says, is half-time in the locker room. Too old now to recover easily from colossal mistakes, too young to rest on his laurels, Midlifeman feels a sense of urgency to do it now (whatever it is) and to do it right, a sense that this is the last kick at the can. It's a time of some reckoning, especially of the rules and assumptions. A reckoning not just of what has passed, but of what being a man is.
The nature of camaraderie and male bonding; the intimate relationship of man and car (or suvs); the effects of having grown up in the era of Playboy and living now in the era of aids and divorce; the shock of suddenly being single again and back in the dating game; the testosterone-driven appetite for accomplishment, now at its most potent. These are the features of the largely unexplored terrain that Larry Krotz has ventured into, shining his flashlight into the murk and reporting back to the rest of us: