It is pleasing to see the publication of a book-length study of language and masculinity, a focus of research that literally did not exist ten years ago. But although this book is rich in its presentation of data and its description of narrative, I was disappointed. The book falls short of its goal of explicating and understanding men's talk; rather, it reifies stereotypes of men without challenging or questioning why these stereotypes exist.

Although the title is composed of the traditional scholarly two parts, the first part – Men talk – is all we see on the cover, and it is not until we actually open the book that we find out that the book is about men's conversational narratives rather than about all talk produced by men. The cover is thus somewhat deceptive in its simplicity. But the most important problem with the title lies in its intertextuality with Coates's earlier volume, Women talk (1996), which sets up a categorical gender dichotomy on the bookshelf and implies that men's talk and women's talk must be studied in separate books. That the titles are so dichotomous is unfortunate.

The book is faithful, however, to the second half of the title, and it analyzes many narratives told by men. In fact, a strength is that it presents so many different narratives to readers, giving us plenty of data to chew on. The first chapter comprises an overview which describes the author's main aims, a very short discussion about research in men and masculinities, and Coates's data and methods. She has employed a self-taping method similar to Pamela Fishman's (1978), in which participants were given a tape recorder and asked to record themselves. The size of the corpus is another strength of the book, as the patterns Coates finds are often very robust. Chap. 2 introduces the reader to the linguistic analysis of conversational narrative. This would make a good introduction for undergraduate students learning about narrative: It is clear without too much technicality but manages to present the important parts of a narrative.

The third chapter is the heart of the book, showing what features of narrative are common in the sample: certain topics (particularly staying away from the “personal”), male characters, attention to detail, and the use of taboo language, all which Coates claims create a stance of “emotional restraint.” Example narratives are presented that construct achievement, joking relationships, and competition, as are stories in which men are collaborative and “express vulnerability.” Finally, the chapter provides stories in which men construct their heterosexuality by positioning homosexual men as the “Other.”

Chap. 4 shows that men often tell stories in sequences, and that these sequences help build solidarity. Chap. 5 presents comparisons between the men's stories and the women's stories presented in Coates 1996, including “less typical” stories “in an attempt to achieve some balance” (p. 111). I was happy to see this attempt, but in the presentation of such stories as exceptional, the categorical differences become ratified and strengthened as exceptions proving the rule. Moreover, this view suggests that all-male conversations are where we see “real” masculinity, while other situations somehow cause deviations from this authentic male type. In fact, men have many different kinds of masculinities that can be modulated and presented differently depending on the stance they wish to take with their interlocutors. We can find patterns of the kinds of stances men typically take with each other, but none is more authentic than another (see Kiesling 2001). That men (and speakers in general) are assumed to be so one-dimensional and without agency is a serious weakness of the book's analyses.

Such problems are ameliorated somewhat in the next chapter, in which Coates turns to the question of “how the presence of women can affect men” (note the lack of men's agency here, though). More than in any other chapter, the analyses here provide a realistic picture of the variety and interactivity of men's lives. Coates finds that the “female effect” depends on what other participants are present in the conversation, and especially on the men's relationships with women. This is not ground-breaking sociolinguistic news, however, and there is no attempt to theorize about the reasons and directions of these shifts.

The narratives in chap. 6 are the most diverse, and they begin to show how the category of all-male talk is but a single part of men's repertoires. Women are also shown to have some agency by making fun of men who display “typical” or “hegemonic” masculinities. The section on family narratives nicely echoes and elaborates the findings of Ochs & Taylor 1995. We see that men do not just take up certain roles and tell certain types of narratives on their own; they are often supported and expected to play these roles by others, especially by women. Chap. 7 further destabilizes a neat picture of men's narrative by showing how men co-construct narratives with girlfriends and wives, and that the kinds of masculinity constructed in these narratives are not always the dominant sort. The final chapter briefly summarizes and concludes.

The stated aims for the book vary as it unfolds. The first formulation states, “I shall attempt to show how masculinity is constructed in talk, and to show how men's talk sustains and perpetuates ‘hegemonic’ masculinity, that is, ‘approved ways of being male’” (4). Later in chap. 1, the aim “is to use stories told by men as a way into the basic cultural ideas which lie behind men's lives and masculine identities at the turn of the century in Britain” (8). So is the talk or the masculinity primary? Or do they interact, and if so, how? This question is a central one for sociolinguistics, but it is not addressed, and the reader is left wondering.

Although Coates claims to “avoid sweeping generalizations and simplistic stereotypes about men and men's talk,” she does not, unfortunately, succeed. “These are men's stories, not stories in general” she writes (35). There are some stark differences in the narratives along the lines that one would expect; men's narratives are described as “narratives of contest,” while women “use narratives of community.” But Coates often makes such sweeping, categorical claims that the previous claim to be uncovering tendencies is made suspect. Here is an example, chosen at random: “Example (5) shows that men will not automatically take the narrative floor when offered it by female peers if to do so would involve them in personal self-disclosure” (158).

Methodologically, Coates does not use participant observation, although she claims to do so. Taping people without meeting them is not participant observation. Even simply playing the narratives to the participants and asking their reactions would have been more ethnographic and probably would have yielded extensive insights. As it is, psychological motivations and states are often attributed to speakers that the data do not support. This is the most serious flaw of this book. We get the sense while reading Coates's analyses that she just doesn't understand what is going on in these men's lives, what they are feeling, why they are doing what they are doing, or even if they were putting her on. This occurs because her methods were not participatory, despite her labels. The book is clearly not the “first in-depth study of all-male conversation,” as it is touted on the cover (emphasis added).

Another serious problem with this book is that, despite the stated aim of using “stories told by men as a way in to the basic cultural ideas which lie behind men's lives and masculine identities at the turn of the century in Britain” (4), there is very little in-depth discussion theorizing about masculinity, or the social world at all, for that matter. The analyses often claim that a narrative or a feature of a narrative is “creating” or “doing hegemonic masculinity,” but it isn't explained how that connection is made, or why that image is hegemonic. “Hegemonic masculinity” is, in fact, a somewhat controversial term in studies of men and masculinities (see Whitehead 2002:88ff), but we have no discussion of this term, merely a simplistic and unproblematic adoption of it. Although some masculinity literature is cited, much is left out and none discussed critically. The concluding chapter, which does address masculinity, is no more than nine pages long. Finally, there is no theory, or even approach, about how language constructs or reflects social relationships and identity. It is merely assumed, it seems, that this creation and reflection happen.

Most disappointing is the evaluation of men's ways of talking as somehow deficient. One can understand wanting to give men a taste of their own historical medicine, but this is hardly scholarship, and certainly not leading by example:

One can imagine what would happen if someone would write that “women should learn that language is to be used for reason and logic as well as emotion.” If Coates had only claimed that this unemotional way of being is somehow caught up in men's dominance of women (and had provided a theoretical account for such a claim), then it would have been understandable, because it is disadvantaging women. But telling stories in an unemotional way need not hurt anyone nor create dominance (although Coates could have highlighted instances where this does happen). Moreover, there is emotion in men's talk, if one knows the men, and where and how to look for it.

In sum, despite the author's claims, this book has not produced an understanding of how men's talk works, why it appears as it is, nor how it constructs masculinities.