Play the Man: A Review

Play the Man - Becoming the Man God Created You to Be  by Author Mark Batterson released May 2, 2017. If you have read any of Mark Batterson’s previous books, I am sure you will want to read this one too. A couple of Batterson’s previous books that I especially enjoyed are, The Circle Maker and All In.

Batterson identifies 7 virtues which he says are necessary to truly Play the Man:

1. Tough as nails; the first virtue of manhood: Tough love
2. A gentleman and a scholar; the second virtue of manhood: Childlike wonder
3. Unbroken; the third virtue of manhood: Will power
4. The 3-headed dragon; the fourth virtue of manhood: Raw passion
5. Sockdolager; the fifth virtue of manhood: True grit
6. Born for the storm; the sixth virtue of manhood: Clear vision
7. Call of duty; the seventh virtue of manhood: Moral courage

Mark Batterson uses a lot of amazing stories, facts and figures to illustrate these various virtues. Here are just a few of them.

1^st Story

“In 1992, a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan made front-page news. For years, Larry Trapp terrorized Michael Weisser, a Jewish leader in his community, making death threats against him and his synagogue. Then one day Larry suddenly tore his Nazi flags, destroyed his hate literature, and renounced the KKK. Why? Because when Larry Trapp was dying of a diabetes-related kidney disease and unable to care for himself, Michael Weisser took him into his home and cared for him. “He showed me so much love,” said Larry Trapp, “that I could not help but love (him) back.”

2^nd story

When Teddy Roosevelt was President his naturalist friend, William Beebe was visiting. They went out on the White House lawn to look at the stars. “Locating a faint spot of light in the lower left-hand corner of the Pegasus constellation, Roosevelt said, ‘That is the spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of one hundred million galaxies. It is seven hundred and fifty thousand light-years away.  It consists of a hundred billion suns, each larger than our own sun.’” Roosevelt and Beebe marveled at those facts for a moment. Then almost like a little child, the president said, “Now I think we feel small enough, let’s go to bed.”

“A hundred years later, astrophysicists estimate the existence of at least eighty billion galaxies, which should make us feel even smaller!”

It is said that Teddy Roosevelt read an average of 500 books per year while he was president.

3^rd story

Viktor Frankl survived being a prisoner in a Nazi death camp. After his release he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Batterson says Frankl was not responsible for being in the death camp, but he was “response-able.”

“There is no situation under the sun in which your ability to respond can be taken away from you. You may not control your circumstances, but you control your reactions to them.”

Well you should read the book for a lot more stories, facts and figures that can help one toward becoming the man God created you to be. By the way Batterson says the lessons he puts forth for men are good for women, too - men just need them more.