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Donald Moss MD, the seasoned New York based psychoanalyst, has brought his full attention and his exciting writing voices to the complexity of men and ‘masculinity’. The author of Hating in the first person plural: Psychoanalytic essays on racism, homophobia, misogyny, and terror (2003), known for his deep concern for and writings about troubled modern society's ills, including the abject ethics of the death penalty (in sum, civilization and its discontents), writes philosophically, at times soaringly, and always with rhetorical muscle on parallels between homophobia and misogyny; the evocation of hatred in the culture towards gays and transsexuals; and the evils of a unitary tough ‘masculinity’ that can stand for being ‘a man’. What can that saturated noun ‘masculinity’ possibly mean both socioculturally and in our work as psychoanalysts, he asks. Expectably, there is no answer. Employing his self-interrogatory writing voice, each question the author asks seems to draw the reader further into a maze of complexity and density, evoked by his ‘cascade’ (to use one of his signal words) of ideas, images, contradictions, abstractions and fevered paradoxes. A different writing voice shows up in his clinical work - bringing his patients to life, deftly drawing us into their conflicts in an orderly fashion, exposing their bold fantasies, their prides, their pained longings, their miseries, failures and self hatreds, sharing his interpretations and interventions with their varying impact. Perhaps one of Moss's most arresting voices delivers his gutwrenching narrative about his father telling him over and over his war experiences. This piece is in ‘War Stories’ at the end of the book. I confess I found shocking the account of his father's repetitive emotional bombardment of him as a little boy - one presumes, a signal of his own ill-suppressed but denied suffering - pouring out vivid stories of himself as a perpetrator of criminal sounding acts of revenge as a US soldier on t