I was excited to see this essay collection about Breaking Bad's approach to masculinity offered in the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program. Unfortunately,the collection was mostly a disappointment.

The collection, edited by Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw, takes an academic approach to the show, analyzing it through, for example, the lens of Foucault or Machiavelli. Sometimes this kind of analysis is compelling, and sometimes it isn't. As it happens, the book mostly references philosophers and thinkers whose work I don't know well. That doesn't have to be a problem if the writers are able to explain these thinkers' ideas and build on them in interesting ways. Jeffrey Reid Pettis's essay "Men in Control" does this well by considering how the characters' behaviors are guided by their feeling of being in a Foucaultian panopticon, thus leading them to act according to the roles they believe society has set out for them.

Another essay that I liked was Susan Johnson's "Family Man," in which Walt is described as someone whose supposedly virtuous acts are all about maintaining his masculinity---or his view of what masculinity is. I particularly liked the way she contrasted Walt to Hank, who seemed on the surface, especially in the first few episodes, to embody the worst sort of masculinity. Eventually, however, it becomes clear that Hank is genuinely interested in others' well-being in a way that Walt is not. He has all the machismo and all the tenderness.

Walt is the focus of most of the essays, but he is often considered alongside Hank, Gus Fring, Hector Salamanca, Mike Ehrmentrout, and, of course, Jesse Pinkman. Skyler gets a fair bit of attention as well, mostly in a series of odd roundtable discussions about fan reaction to Skyler. Saul Goodman, however, is almost entirely ignored, which I found curious. It was especially odd to me that one of the essayists, Ian Dawe, fails to mention him entirely when naming the show's major characters. Then again, he also offers up the howler that all but one of the show's major characters are middle-aged men. The exception? Jesse Pinkman. I'm not sure it's reasonable to justify leaving Lydia and Marie out of a list of main characters, but omitting Skyler sends a very unfortunate signal about which characters matter.

As a copyeditor, I try very hard to overlook typos and infelicities in wording when I read. It's difficult for me to stop editing in my head once I start paying attention at that level. But this book was riddled with so many howlers (Gary Grant, inconsistent italicizing of Breaking Bad) that I couldn't block them out. I hate being a curmudgeon about this because I know an editor's work only gets noticed when it fails---and because I know I'm guilty of typos all the time. But I was really distracted by these glitches. Maybe if the essays themselves had been better I wouldn't have noticed. ( )

As with any collection of essays, your mileage may vary and some essays are better than others.

I'd say this had a worse ratio than usual, I think because despite this being billed as an academic text, the majority of contributors are outside of academia and seem to have a distorted, extreme idea of what is required to write an academic essay. Susan Johnston's "Family Man" essay is like a caricature of a media studies journal article, purposely dense and scattered with brief, unnecessary quotes. R. Nicholas Gerlich's "study" of Breaking Bad fans -- a survey with unaddressed sampling bias so obvious I wanted to throw up -- was offered as causal when it's a survey replete with methodological issues. (In my field, this "study" would be laughed out of the room at even suggesting it were descriptive!) Later, he brings this up again to make some kind of point of generalizability of fan reactions to Skyler that (a) comes from a study that is not generalizable whatsoever, (b) ignores the sampling issue that should be quite obvious in terms of comparing the demographics of survey respondents (not representative) and message board posters (also not representative but in a different way), and (c) has no reference point to the literature around internet participation's interaction with gender. (This is not even my field and I have a passing familiarity with this. The idea that this person does not yet wants to pass this survey off as meaningful in any way is frankly horrifying.)

There's also a structural complaint I had about the book, which is that the same episodes and events are revisited over and over again throughout. Reading this, you'd think that Breaking Bad only had Season 1 and Season 5.

Not recommended. ( )

This book is comprised of a series of round table discussions and essays written by academics, discussing how masculinity is portrayed in the television series "Breaking Bad". There are ten chapters and a large annotated bibliography as well as an episode list.

The book is heavily academic so for those looking for episode recaps or easily accessible discussion this is not the book for you. It is definitely tilted toward university and college academics and those interested in academic discussions of popular culture. To that end, the book is high quality and is a very viable piece of source material for those who want to use it as such.

Some of the essays are better than others. Those that I liked, while maintaining an academic tone, also were more reader friendly and made the reader feel a part of the conversation. A couple of the essays were almost arrogant in tone, talking down to the reader. Those also happened to be the ones that were far less well written.The round table discussions were interesting and well put together making them easy to follow.

The one thing I think I found most disappointing about the book was that every essay and discussion focused on the same limited number of episodes. In five seasons of "Breaking Bad" there was plenty of material and characters that could have been discussed in relation to masculinity in this series. Most of the writing focused solely on Walter and Skyler White.

The book could have been much stronger if more of the episodes had been discussed in relation to the subject matter. I also think there could have been some positive critical perspectives about masculinity from both sexes. It felt like the masculinity being explored was less critical analysis and more just critical.

All of that being said, I would still recommend the book. Once I started reading, I was hooked and my interest never wavered. I found it hard to put down and I was always looking for a bit of time to read a few more pages or another chapter. If you like "Breaking Bad" this is a fun book with heavy ideas on which to chew. ( )

I have to admit I do not have any idea what to do with this book. I for some reason thought it would be a single analysis, but instead it's a collection of basically Cultural Studies (or whatever they call that major in your college) essays that I frankly would have read only if required. And only if I couldn't drop the course. In the end, I can't actually review this book: I'm not qualified to have any sort of opinion about it. ( )

For a "Bad Fan" this book, a collection of essays that explore the characters and world of "Breaking Bad" is very interesting. It's interesting to have the characters dissected and analyzed. For those of us who watched the show as it unfolded in it's original run, it's a compelling read. Many of the writers came to the show later after being persuaded by family, friends and students that it was worth watching. Watch the series again and read this companion book, it will make the experience more memorable. ( )