MARIO SCHMIDT is a senior fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), where his geographical focus is on rural Western Kenya and Nairobi. Apart from exploring notions of masculinity among rural-urban migrants, he is interested in the effects of evidence-based development aid interventions across East Africa and the epistemological and ethical foundations of the behavioral sciences.

Daniel Jordan Smith:
Ethnographically rich and revealing, this highly readable book brings alive the experiences of Nairobi's migrant men at home and in the workplace, among family and friends, and with women and male peers. In vivid, accessible prose and with obvious empathy, Mario Schmidt shows how economic constraints and social obstacles constantly frustrate-but never extinguish-his interlocutors' desires to live up to widely shared expectations of manhood.