In the Land of Lost Men, No ONe Asks for Direction

Let us now profile superfluous men. Charlie LeDuff, a reporter for The New York Times, often writes about folks who claw and hang on by their fingernails. For his new book, “US Guys,” he spent a year roaming — sometimes rambling — through masculine America, mainly parts West and South. He hung out at a biker club, a gay rodeo, a circus, a snake-handler revival church, a male modeling agency and a Little Big Horn re-enactment among other sites of lowlife, high jinks and fall-downs. He has a taste for the legions of men who are known today, with a curl of the lip, as losers — or, as he writes about a semipro football team in Amarillo, Tex., that he joins in homage to George Plimpton, “dudes grasping at the frayed end of the rope of hope.”