Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man is a nonfiction book by Thomas Page McBee, published August 14, 2018, by Scribner.

McBee began regularly writing about masculinity in The Rumpus, which led to his first book, Man Alive, in 2014.

His writing is marvelous, pinning ideas that could so easily be abstract to the visceral, physical poetry of boxing.

"[1] The Rumpus called it "a must-read for parsing through the many layers of toxic masculinity and white privilege in American culture that allowed Kavanaugh to be seated on the Supreme Court.

He is particularly good at communicating his own fear and ambivalence—both in crossing the gender frontier and in learning a sport that draws on a brutal code of male behaviour that his experience has given him reason to reject."