BUILDING MEN

Tracy reflects on the men in his life and the ways in which he has benefitted from their diverse mentorship in this memoir.

Young men today, in the author’s estimation, are lacking. But it’s not their fault—they just don’t have the kind of mentors he had when he was coming of age. “The erosion of character that has become so noticeable in young men these days is not a reflection on the young people of today. It is a reflection of the lack of investment that people of influence have made in them,” he says. Growing up, Tracy, now a licensed pilot and entrepreneur, was surrounded by rock-ribbed men like his Grandpa Brown, who believed in the free market, small government, and the “ownership of land and the free rights to use that land as you saw fit.” Grandpa Brown, a physician in South Dakota, also read the Wall Street Journal every day and cancelled medical debts for “worthy or needy patients” at Christmas. The author describes his father as a “Purple Heart-winning American hero from the Greatest Generation.” Tracy doesn’t limit his pantheon of mentors and influencers to those he encountered in childhood—as he makes clear, such figures can come in and out of our lives at any age. “The generation before mine defeated evil, built the greatest economy, and became the greatest moral defender the world has ever known,” Tracy writes in the introduction. The author further states, “Our society needs to remember how it came to pass that the men who were the primary builders of this country did what they did.” How readers will feel about much of what Tracy has to say about manhood will largely depend upon how they resonate with that assessment. In any case, his prose is tidily efficient and the text is accessible—that’s largely due to a tight narrative structure that rarely focuses too long on any particular phase of the author’s professional life. Tracy maintains a warm and collegial tone throughout, making for an amiable reading experience.

A bracing mix of memoir and meditation on mentorship.