THE MEN THEY WILL BECOME: The Nature and Nurture of Male Character. By Eli Newberger Perseus Books. 288 pp. $25

Another book on the subject of boys being boys, this one from the pediatrician who testified against Louise Woodward, the British nanny found guilty by a Massachusetts jury of shaking her infant charge to death. The founder of the Child Protection and Family Violence Unit at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Newberger rejects the argument, advanced by Judith Rich Harris last year in her controversial Nurture Assumption, that peers play a defining role in development. We are born with traits but not character, he says. Character is learned, primarily from one’s parents, and as it develops it becomes "a resource for shaping the part of temperament that is malleable." When character is badly shaped, Newberger looks to the parents first. Parents who, for instance, dislike having an innately shy, inhibited child may "drive him into being an aggressively disobedient child." The author rejects genetic determinism except insofar as he believes males are hard-wired to pursue power and must learn self-control.

Newberger concludes his anecdotal analysis by championing the wisdom of "all the great moral philosophers from Aristotle to Bernard Shaw," to wit: the "pathway to character" is "to renounce some of the satisfactions which men normally crave." In place of caveman power plays, he recommends "reciprocity in marriage, parenthood, work or play." And to those adages he appends the Socratic oath. With selfknowledge "comes the possibility of fulfillment, and of character that will continue to be strengthened by choosing to do right, and, after failure, to do better the next time."

You knew this, of course, but there’s no harm in hearing it again.

—A. J. Hewat