Over the past 20 years, academic approaches to studies of sex and gender have developed comprehensively. Insights into the performative nature of gender/s, studies of the politics of identity and the emergence of cultural geography as an intellectual home for many studies of gender in place have brought new intellectual depth to research. The ways of seeing advanced within such epistemologies undertake important academic work. They bring people and places to life and interrogate contexts that give rise to subjects of research. Research projects should also offer fresh insights into people and places and bring new life to thought. In choosing to review European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities I committed the naive act of seeing oneself in another. I wanted to read a cultural geography book. My credentials for responding to this work, which is largely an empirical catalogue of studies on men in Europe, are not grounded in statistical acuity but in an interest in masculinity studies as a nexus between theoretical resources and the lived world. I apologise in advance for the fact that I am not a positivist and – try as I might – I am unable to love a book that does not offer contributions to socio‐cultural or socio‐geographical theory. This book does, however, stake out an area of empirical social research. In so doing, it also claims a field of cross‐disciplinary research on men in Europe: as the data drawn together are taken from a range of academic areas. The publication of this work is a feat of logistical success and plainly attests to the influence and hard work of Jeff Hearn and Keith Pringle.