(FORTUNE Magazine) – Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male by Susan Faludi Morrow, 662 pages

When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, 541 pages

Mailer by Mary V. Dearborn Houghton Mifflin, 457 pages

Why does full-throttle masculinity seem like such an obnoxious force these days? What happened to the old-fashioned healthy version, passed on by dads who taught their sons right from wrong, how to throw a curve ball, and how to be a man. Three new books form a kind of meditation on that theme--David Maraniss' biography of Vince Lombardi, Mary Dearborn's portrait of Norman Mailer, and Susan Faludi's treatise on how angry white men are born.

Faludi's book Stiffed is the follow-up to her bestseller Backlash, which highlighted the media's antipathy to feminism. In Stiffed, Faludi examines "toxic masculinity," saying it comes from unfathered sons, who feel cheated by a failed postwar promise of social purpose and economic ascension. Their dads failed to pass on a formula for masculinity that worked. The space frontier they went out to conquer turned out to be sterile; the communist enemy they were meant to defeat permitted no clear "World War II-style" victory; and perhaps most unsettling, the gals they were supposed to protect did it for themselves. The result was a couple of generations of man-children whose sense of manliness is derived from action movies and sports stadiums.

But it wasn't ever thus. New biographies of two ur-men of the postwar era, Vince Lombardi and Norman Mailer, suggest simpler causes of "toxic masculinity."

In When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss, author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, describes the lengths coach Lombardi went to embody and shape the tough guy. He told the boys at West Point, "Face guards are for sissies," and at Green Bay he instituted a drill called the "nutcracker" in which two lineman took a "test of manhood" by getting to "pound the hell" out of each other. Norman Mailer, as Mary Dearborn chronicles in her observant biography, let doubts about the manliness of his career choice drive him to ludicrous lengths--head-butting, drinking and staring contests, and woman beating, that sort of thing--to prove his cojones were made of iron.

If you listen to Faludi, she'll explain that the problem starts with the parents. Indeed, Maraniss opens his Lombardi biography by noting, "Everything begins with the body of the father." He explains that Vince's old man was a muscular, tattooed butcher who had the words work and play emblazoned on the fingers of each hand. But Harry Lombardi was also deeply devoted to his wife and children--he never missed a family meal. The younger Lombardi absorbed the lessons of work and play but not the lesson about devotion. His neglect of his wife drove her to regular suicide attempts, and he admitted, "I was a terrible father." Since that's not what his dad taught him, how would Faludi explain that?

She's on surer ground when she says these noxious tough guys embody the "ornamental male," the cock-of-the-walk driven more by the allure of display than by some inner compass. Lombardi's son sometimes caught him rehearsing facial expressions--sober, grimacing, intense--in front of the mirror. Mailer painted himself as a transgressive hipster while he had pot-roast dinner with his parents every week. Even his boxing bouts required partners who pulled their punches.

Faludi's sociologically attuned diagnosis of the present-day male crisis may be partly right, but, as these two tough guys' lives suggest, the problem with men has always been the same: Some of us are just plain jerks.

--Albert Mobilio