A relentlessly honest and revealing memoir.
A noted activist tells the inspiring story of he/r struggles discovering and living he/r lesbian intersex identity.
Until s/he was 20 years old, Viloria lived he/r life as a female (pronouns the author self-identifies with). But when a doctor said that the size of he/r clitoris “just [wasn’t] normal” and asked to run tests on he/r, Viloria began to question he/r identity. He/r femaleness had never been an issue at home; neither he/r mother nor he/r doctor father had ever discussed he/r physical differences and never allowed for any surgical alterations at birth. At the same time, however, he/r Catholic upbringing had made it difficult for Viloria to acknowledge to he/r parents that s/he was a lesbian. A move to San Francisco in 1990 propelled the author on a journey of sexual self-discovery that included relationships primarily with women and occasionally men. Five years later, and after reading a newspaper article on intersex people, s/he finally came to the realization that s/he, too, was intersex, or as s/he would say later on, a “hermaphrodyke.” Viloria began experimenting with he/r identity and, for a time, dressed and acted like a male before settling into a more consciously androgynous mode of self-presentation. S/he also became involved with intersex organizations, where s/he not only learned the vocabulary to articulate he/r identity, but also about the surgeries that deprived other hermaphrodites “the opportunity to explore who and what they were, from the beginning.” He/r awakening consciousness to the plight of intersex people drove he/r to shed all remaining vestiges of inhibition regarding he/r differences and become a passionate advocate of the intersex community. In he/r personal life, Viloria came to understand and eventually break self-destructive patterns that had kept he/r from the loving lesbian partnership s/he had always wanted for herself. Intelligent and courageous, the author’s book chronicles one intersex person’s path to wholeness, but it also affirms the right of all intersex and nonbinary people to receive dignity and respect.
A relentlessly honest and revealing memoir.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-34784-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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