The brave, often funny account of how a woman came to terms with her husband's decision to become female.
When Benvenuto discovered that Tracey, her husband of 20 years, wanted to live as a woman, she was shocked. Suddenly, their shared closet became filled with women's clothes ranging from "tarty and juvenile [to] conservative and middle aged.” The author watched with a mixture of sadness, amusement and horror as her husband began shaving his body hair and taking the hormones that would cause him to lose weight and permanently complain of "fatigue, stomach ailments and dizziness.” As difficult as it was for her to see Tracey's transformations, it was even more confusing for her two young daughters and her pre-adolescent son. Was Daddy a man, a woman or, as her toddler asked, a "guy-woman"? Friends (especially female ones), therapists and even the members of a Jewish community group to which the pair belonged all seemed to side with Tracey and his struggles. Few understood Benvenuto's own awkward position as a "transwidow" or the fact that she was unwilling to rewrite her past life with him so that Tracey could become "she.” The author finally divorced Tracey. Even in the aftermath, however, neighbors and strangers in the hometown she calls "the Valley of the Politically Correct" still display a voyeuristic delight in inquiring whether Tracey had taken the last surgical step toward attaining womanhood. In an unexpected twist, Benvenuto found fulfillment with another man. The personal and moral complications in this book are many, but all make for thought-provoking reading. A refreshingly gutsy narrative that offers a compelling view of sexual maturity and a sexual coming-of-age at midlife.
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-64950-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
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