Journalism becomes literature in this memorable meditation on identity, belonging, and the urge to find understanding.
A remarkable story of lives spent hiding—sometimes in plain sight—in the shadow of bigotry and fear.
In a tale with depths as murky as a bayou's, Parks, a reporter on gender issues for the Washington Post, pursues a lead dropped long ago. As her mother lamented that her daughter’s sexuality would get her kicked out of church in small-town Louisiana, her grandmother quietly remarked, “I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man.” The two cases weren’t quite analogous, but Parks runs with the clue “because I believed,” she recounts, “that a good Southern tale might turn my work life around.” It may have done, but it took years for Parks to chase down the story of the girl who, it seems, had been kidnapped as a child and raised as a man called Roy, a story detailed in Roy’s multivolume diary. Some townsfolk attributed the puzzling question of Roy’s gender to accident, some to abuse, some to a poverty that led to her being “too poor to wear dresses,” some to divine accident. Even a more or less sympathetic acquaintance would venture only that Roy was a “morphodite,” which is to say, “Half man, half woman.” Even Roy’s tombstone, recording both male and female names, wasn’t clear on the matter. As for the diary, which Parks eventually found, Roy ponders, among other things, the idea that the body is just a temporary shell. The author sharply recounts the rampant pain, confusion, and prejudice but also effort on the parts of some of those small-town folk to find room for Roy and others who didn’t quite fit in. Along the way, Parks uncovers Southern gothic–worthy secrets on the parts of her family and their community. Instead of finding longed-for definitive answers, she concludes, “I understand now that most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever.”
Journalism becomes literature in this memorable meditation on identity, belonging, and the urge to find understanding.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-65853-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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