An uplifting testimonial to the power of unconditional familial love and acceptance.
A new family must regroup after their toddler exhibits gender ambivalence.
Whittington, a mother of two, poignantly chronicles the transformative journey of Ryland, her young son who was born female. On his first birthday, the author’s son was diagnosed as deaf. A year later, the child received cochlear implants to enable hearing and speech capability. Then, after expressing tomboy inclinations and masculine bathroom traits, he tearfully announced, “I’m a boy.” Initially distressed, the family viewed the issue as much more than just a toddler phase and slowly began adapting to the fact that their daughter truly identified as a boy in every way. When their second daughter, Brynley, was born, they came to terms with their transgendered son. Both the author and her husband struggled with the critical next steps in Ryland’s upbringing, his gender identity, and childhood development, while their greatest “fears came from how the world would view our child.” The road was arduous, yet it began with a simple haircut and proper pronoun use. Amid the years of “private turmoil” and Ryland’s many expected (and unexpected) challenges with school and societal rejection, the Whittingtons proactively educated themselves, posted videos online, and emerged as a consistently supportive and nurturing unit. Sensitively handled and written in breezy prose that doesn’t linger too long on the expository details of their ordeal, the author sets a fine example for other parents either imagining or personally experiencing a similar situation. Believing their joint understanding and acceptance of Ryland will result in a blissful childhood, the Whittingtons have truly afforded their son the opportunity to “grow up with the chance to cultivate the same self-love and confidence to which every child has the right when he or she is born.”
An uplifting testimonial to the power of unconditional familial love and acceptance.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-238888-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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