Overview

What I wanted after college was a job and my own apartment, but what I needed was a good comeuppance, and that's what I got.

When Dave Itzkoff graduated from Princeton in 1998-the first member of his family to earn a college degree-he expected to be rewarded with a career, and a life, that mattered. Instead, he ended up convinced that he was selling the entire institution of manhood down the river.
After a series of personal and professional experiences stripped him of any lingering sense of entitlement, Itzkoff found himself working as an editor at Maxim, the pugnacious frontrunner in a new breed of men's periodicals dubbed lad magazines. There, he was initiated into a culture of heavily retouched girlie pictorials, dirty jokes, disingenuous sex advice, and shopping guides for expensive electronic gadgetry. And as Maxim continued its inexorable rise to become the most successful men's magazine in modern publishing history, Itzkoff was left wondering what his work-and his life-really meant.
Lads is the hilarious, heartbreaking story of Dave Itzkoff's efforts to define himself as a man while working at a magazine that was purveying a vision of young manhood-a state of perpetual adolescence-that was seductive to all but viable for none. Lads takes us deep inside one young man's struggle with identity, responsibility, and sexuality, in an unsparingly candid account of how men really relate to one another, as fathers and sons, as employers and employees, as colleagues and friends.
Lads is trenchant. Lads is perceptive. Lads is alarmingly funny. This is an unforgettable debut from a young writer of astounding talent.

From the Hardcover edition.

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9780812970296

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Reviews

Funny and angry, LADS captures all the sad comedy of male life with fearless candor. Seeing through man at his worst is Itzkoff is at his best. -Rick Marin, author of Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor <br> LADS is one of the most compelling not-coming-of-age tales I've read in a long time. Dave Itzkoff spares nobody, particularly himself, and the result is one agonizingly funny book. -Ted Heller, author of Funnymen and Slab Rat <br> Reading Dave Itzkoff's relentlessly honest and darkly comedic LADS is like watching a man's creation, his obliteration, and his sardonic redemption -- all before the age of 25. LADS may appear to be a media criticism, but it's really a humanity criticism. And it's remarkably dead on. -Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Fargo Rock City <p> From the Hardcover edition.

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