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.

Across the world, we see an explosion of unpredictable violence committed by alienated young men. Jamil Jivani recounts his experiences working as a youth activist throughout North America and the Middle East, drawing striking parallels between ISIS recruits, gangbangers, and Neo-Nazis in the West. Having narrowly escaped a descent into crime and gang violence in his native Toronto, Jivani has devoted his life to helping other at-risk youths avoid this fate in cities across North America. After the Paris terrorist attacks of 2016, he traveled to Europe and the Middle East to assist Muslim community outreach groups focused on deterring ISIS recruitment. Why Young Men is the story of Jivani’s education as an activist on the front lines of one of today’s most dangerous and intractable problems: the explosion of violence among angry young men throughout the world. Jivani relates his personal story and describes his entrance into the community outreach movement, his work with disenfranchised people of color in North America and at-risk youth in the Middle East and Africa, and his experiences with the white working class. The reader learns along with him as he profiles a diverse array of young men and interviews those who are trying to help them, drawing parallels between these groups, refuting the popular belief that they are radically different from each other, and offering concrete steps toward countering this global trend.

The world needs young men to grow up into real men. But here's the problem: young men get so many conflicting messages about what it means to be a man, they find it hard to know what masculinity looks like when men are at their absolute best. Into this cultural confusion Brant Hansen paints a refreshingly specific, compelling picture of what men are designed to be. Combining depth and humor, he calls for young men of all interests and backgrounds to be ambitious about the right things and to see themselves as protectors and defenders of the vulnerable, with whatever resources they have at their disposal. The (Young) Men We Need is witty, to the point, bracingly honest, and packed with wisdom. Perfect for any guy age 14 and up who wants to know "Why am I here?"--and is ready to show up. Includes discussion questions.

Publisher Description

Did you ever wonder about what’s out there? The one thing that religion prohibits is the right to question. In the real world we are all free to ask that we may grow. It is the relationship between the Creator and the created that is the beginning of our understanding. And this is the first step in the finding of faith in the discovery of what love is and in the wonder of being loved. When the answer is given we can move forward into the new day. We have right now and the journey begins with our first breath and ends with our last sigh. In between it is the miracles unfolding that are the treasures we keep forever. The one who gives is the true gift and there in the giving is the miracle itself- that we are remembered.