An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body.
A searing, deeply personal story about the author’s emotional journey of self-discovery.
“This is the question of my body and my story about it: is it just mine?” So writes Whitney (Creative Writing/Goddard Coll.; Ghost Box, 2014) early on in the narrative, which is fragmented, elliptical, and consistently provocative. The author tells their story in three parts, each beautifully poised and composed of brief paragraphs, some only one short sentence. Piecemeal, like snapshots, Whitney slowly reveals an early life of uncertainty, pain, and suffering: “I grew up knowing fear as an inheritance of femininity.” The story washes back and forth in time as the author reflects on their sexuality and family: Mom and Hank, two brothers, Tye and Gunnar; and Grammy. Along the way, Whitney interjects bits of literature and psychology, wisdom gleaned from a variety of sources, including Freud, Lacan, Allen Ginsberg, Johanna Hedva, Robert J. Stoller, Luce Irigaray, and Eli Clare. Mom is the key to this story. “As a kid,” writes Whitney, “I was a flame in the corner lighting up all of Mom’s mistakes.” Chronicling their mother’s drinking, being physically abused, splitting with her husband, and moving around as she tried to raise her family, Whitney does a fine job uncovering their complex relationship. “This book,” they write, “isn’t about individuation or even coming of age…it’s about ways to find a response, to respond to her.” About Grammy, the author writes, “I love this woman for throwing me into deep water….My heritage is her hopefulness and the complexity of a body that looks, in parts, like hers.” The author recounts adolescent years filled with questions, fears, drinking, drugs, cutting, boys, girls, and homelessness—as well as a bad reaction to testosterone. Upon meeting other trans kids, writes Whitney, “I was the happiest around them I’d ever been.” In 2011, the author underwent breast removal surgery: “I’ve edited my body, mixed my skin around with some money.”
An incisive, nuanced inquiry into gender and body.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944211-76-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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