A timely, significant examination of the distinction between sexual affinity and sexual identity.
How a politically conservative middle-class family defended their transgender daughter against bigotry and won a groundbreaking legal victory affirming gender identity.
Although the state of Maine—home to the subjects of this book, the Maines family—was one of the early states to pass a law “creating domestic partnerships for same-sex couples,” the civil rights of transsexuals opened new territory. The issue that led to the lawsuit was the decision by the Orono school board to exclude the Maines’ transgender daughter, Nicole, from using the girls' bathroom after she entered fifth grade—a response to pressure by the Christian Civic League of Maine. More than five years later, the case was finally resolved at the level of Maine's Supreme Court. Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post health and science writer Nutt (Shadows Bright as Glass: The Remarkable Story of One Man's Journey from Brain Trauma to Artistic Triumph, 2011, etc.) weaves together a multilayered narrative, which begins with the private adoption of identical twin boys, Jonas and Wyatt. At age 3, the twins were sociable, lively, and healthy, but Wyatt had begun to exhibit problems with his gender identity. He told his father, “Daddy, I hate my penis,” and had begun to show an interest in girls' clothing and toys. The author chronicles the steady evolution of Wyatt's conviction that he was really a girl and the evolving dynamic this created within the family. Nutt reports on medical opinion that gender is established physiologically within the brain and is a matter of heredity. This is especially fascinating in the case of identical twins raised together, only one of whom is transgendered. What is clear in this gripping account is the strength of the emotional bond within the family as Wyatt became Nicole, a bond that deepened as the stakes increased and pressure mounted.
A timely, significant examination of the distinction between sexual affinity and sexual identity.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9541-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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