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In Man Made, Martin Berger interprets selected works by Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) as complex, compensatory visions of manhood that assuaged the anxieties of both the artist and his male contemporaries in an era of diminishing expectations for traditional masculinity. As such, Berger's book performs a valuable service by situating Eakins as an active participant within a key historical discourse, one that preoccupied many Americans, including Theodore Roosevelt, George Beard, and the artist's friend, S. Weir Mitchell. Bringing to bear the avalanche of recent scholarship on masculinity by cultural historians Michael Kimmel, E. Anthony Rotundo, and others, Berger closely reads a cluster of works by Eakins, contending that they enabled the painter and "white, middle-class" (1) male beholders "to refashion their conceptions of masculine identity" in order "to regulate, moderate, or improve men's masculine standings" (2). According to Berger, such strategies were especially urgent for Eakins in light of the painter's failure to meet conventional benchmarks of middle-class masculine achievement - military service, economic self-sufficiency, home ownership, social respectability, fatherhood - at a time when...