An inspiring account of self-discovery and self-realization.
In this debut transgender memoir, a retired geologist muses about the powerful forces that shape people and rocks.
Shepard begins her book with a discussion of crystals forming in Earth’s magma: “As they grow, they are swept along with other crystals in the stream, colliding with each other and the chamber walls. On their long journey, the crystals absorb an impurity here, suffer a tiny fracture there, and in so doing each becomes unique….So it is with people.” Born Richard—and called Butch by her father, at least until he abandoned the family—the author discovered a love of rocks at an early age. Her mother encouraged the hobby, buying Shepard a copy of The Golden Book of Rocks and Minerals. The author’s other hobby—trying on women’s clothes—caused greater consternation, especially when Shepard realized her gender identity was at odds with the body she was born with. Coming-of-age in the late 1960s, the author was thrown headfirst into the counterculture, Vietnam-era naval service, GI Bill college courses, and, eventually, marriage to a woman named Barbara. But the contradiction at the heart of her identity never went away. It led Shepard to a terrible choice on a literal cliff edge once she reached middle age: whether to end her torment once and for all—or to figure out a way to live her truth. The author writes with precision and feeling about both her personal trials and her geological passions. Her prose paints an emotional landscape fraught with excitement and anxiety: “Tuesday evenings in downtown Bellingham were quiet, and this night was no exception. There were just enough people around to let us practice not ‘getting clocked,’ that is, being identified as cross-dressers, but not enough to intimidate us into hiding ourselves. We were all learning, building our courage day by day.” It’s an engrossing tale, in part because so much of it is set in decades that now feel quite remote. Shepard introduces readers to a secret world that feels simultaneously familiar and alien, idiosyncratic and Middle American. While the work’s autobiographical arc is predictable in broad terms, the narrative’s turns are often surprising, and readers will be happy to follow wherever the author leads.
An inspiring account of self-discovery and self-realization.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73500-320-7
Page Count: 333
Publisher: Crystal Hill Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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