How Not To Be a Boy by Robert Webb PDF Download

November 11, 2020 Popular

Download How Not To Be a Boy by Robert Webb PDF eBook free. The “How Not To Be a Boy” is a witty, honest coming-of-age story with a subtext that tackles masculinity and manhood.

Description of How Not To Be a Boy by Robert Webb PDF

How Not To Be a Boy is a witty, honest coming-of-age story with a subtext that tackles masculinity and manhood. Robert Webb is the author of this book. Webb puts into writing what a lot of us must have felt during parts of our adolescence. The style is easy, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic unpolished in delivery and sometimes heartbreakingly honest, at other times shy and discreet. Along the way, there are mini-polemics on identity, masculinity, relationships, and emotion. Webb portrays his life to date in a series of vignettes which vary from the banal to the deeply introspective to a wider questioning of the world he found himself growing into. The narrative is driven largely by extracts from his diary, and punctuated by conversations his 40-odd-year-old self-has with the teenage Robert, the twenty-something Robert.

There’s a sense of the ridiculous throughout these moments, the benefit of hindsight throwing perspective on the younger man’s feelings; not that they are any less the deeply felt at the time. Webb’s prose is fluid, fast, readable and the pages fly by. There is a build up of momentum which ends rather suddenly; the book ends almost with a sigh, as if the author is glad to have told this story, and raised many more questions than he can (or claims to) answer. It seemed more a starting point for my own reflection, rather than a conclusive memoir: as Webb implies, life is very much ongoing, rather than a state one arrives at eventually. He makes us laugh, he makes us think, occasionally he wets the eye. I read the book in two-weekend sessions and felt uplifted, encouraged and a little more human at the end of it.