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 post sexual-revolution culture.
