Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award
The day after the 2015 Paris terror attacks, twenty-eight-year-old Canadian Jamil Jivani opened the newspaper to find that the men responsible were familiar to him. He didn’t know them, but the communities they grew up in and the challenges they faced mirrored the circumstances of his own life. Jivani travelled to Belgium in February 2016 to better understand the roots of jihadi radicalization. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men who lived in the same neighbourhood as him.
Jivani was raised in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration. Having grown up with a largely absent father, he knows what it is to watch a man’s future influenced by gangster culture or radical ideologies associated with Islam. Jivani found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.
Why Young Men is not a memoir but a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.
Jamil Jivani who grew up in a mostly immigrant community in Toronto that faced significant problems with integration, was raised in a home with a largely absent father and knows what it is to encounter negative influences posing as authorities on masculinity. As a young man he found himself at a crossroads: he could follow the kind of life we hear about too often in the media, or he could choose a safe, prosperous future. He opted for the latter, attending Yale University and becoming a lawyer, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and a powerful speaker for the disenfranchised.
At the age of twenty-eight, following the 2015 Paris attacks, Jivani sought to better understand young men in crisis by exploring the conditions that embolden violent extremists. Less than two months later, Brussels fell victim to a terrorist attack carried out by young men from the very neighborhood Jivani was trying to understand. Many young men experience crises in their private lives, and they harm others in the process. News headlines regularly highlight examples of young men who turn to gangs, terror cells or other extremist groups, revealing much deeper problems in Europe and North America, and the urgent need to give young people a sense of belonging in the West.
Why Young Men is a book of ideas that pursues a positive path and offers a counterintuitive, often provocative argument for a sea change in the way we look at young men, and for how they see themselves.
“Offers an analysis on how young men, especially racialized men, are influenced and provides insights into what society can do about it.”
