This week I’m giving away three copies of Eric Metaxas‘ book, Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness. Eric is the author of New York Times #1 bestseller Bonhoeffer. He is currently the voice of BreakPoint, heard across 1,400 radio outlets by an audience of 8 million. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Eric a few questions about his new book:
Margaret: For readers who aren’t familiar with your book, what is main idea?
Eric: We’re having a crisis of manhood in the culture. I get into that in the book’s introduction and explain that in the last forty years or so we’ve denigrated the idea of heroes, focusing mainly on the negative attributes of notable men from history. George Washington is the classic example. And we have simultaneously avoided talking about the idea of what a man is, because I think we’ve gotten seriously confused about that. As a result, we’ve sent confusing messages to young men in particular and I think this has had some deeply negative consequences.
We all need heroes and role models to inspire us, but I think young men need that especially and we’ve offered them almost nothing positive. Our culture is filled with narcissistic celebrities and showboating, chest-thumping macho athletes. These are all immature boys in the bodies of men, and they’re hardly God’s idea of heroic manhood. You only have to think of Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, and Dennis Rodman to get really depressed. So the seven brief biographical sketches are my shot at the beginning of a solution. I would say that the seven men of the book represent what I would consider God’s idea of what a great man’s life looks like. There are so many others, obviously, but this is my own subjective list.
Margaret: What were the biggest challenges or struggles during the writing process?
Eric: Writing is almost always a real challenge for me. In this case the sheer volume of books out there on each of these seven men made it hard to stop researching and hard to know what material to put in and what to leave out. It could be endless. I wanted to tell the stories of each of these men’s whole lives in twenty-five pages each. So that was just time-consuming and a lot harder than I thought it would be. For the first time in my life I reached out to friends for help on the research with some of them. That was itself humbling for me, because I did every tiny bit of research for my Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer books myself and have never had any kind of help. But this book forced me to reach out and ask for help and I’m so glad that I did. I’d probably still be researching and writing if I hadn’t.
Margaret: Which of the seven men explored in your book was the most interesting to research?
Eric: It sounds like a cop-out and a cliche, but each of them fascinated me in different ways. I think it’s important to say that I didn’t want to suggest that all men need to be the same. There are many kinds of people in the world and God has made all of us different, and that’s quite intentional on his part. So I’ve got a whole range of types among the seven, from athletes to politicians, from family men to celibate singles. George Washington was physically powerful and huge, while William Wilberforce was physically quite small. Eric Liddell and Jackie Robinson and John Paul II and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Chuck Colson are all great in different ways.
But all seven of these men possess tremendous character and virtue. There is a nobility and a heroic quality to all of them that is profoundly important. As the father of a daughter whom I love beyond words, I am extremely interested in what kind of men we are raising in the culture and I’d like the men who are out there in the world to know the stories of these seven great men, because I think if you encounter them you cannot help but be inspired by them and want to be like them. And of course, if the book sells well, my book proposal is all set for Seven Women. Get ready.
Check out the book trailer for Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness:
(RSS Subscribers, click here to view.)
To win one of the THREE COPIES of Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, enter a comment on the original blog post at MargaretFeinberg.com. Winners will be selected and announced on Friday.
Congratulations to the winners: Paul Knight, Amanda Hoggard, Bob
Who is one person in history, whom you would like to meet? What questions would you ask them?
