The book’s starting point is a refusal: andropause is not the male counterpart of the menopause, and it implies neither decline nor the end of masculinity. On the contrary, it is a common developmental crisis, which occurs in men between forty and sixty. This crisis marks a break, and it is from that break that the book sets out: an ending and a beginning in the making of a new individual.

Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff sets out to describe this crucial stage and the various symptoms that bear witness to it: depression, emotional instability, the fear of a sexuality that is “over” even though desire remains intact. From there the themes of the book follow on: fantasies, myths, divorce, infidelity — understood in a broad sense, since it is not exhausted by the couple but also concerns the relation to oneself, to one’s occupation, to society — and the preoccupation with health and with physical performance.

The book rests on a general principle: men in mid-life, for the most part, lead a repressed life, and they approach this stage as a problematic crisis rather than as a formative one.