Journalist and TV television host Mock’s second memoir (Redefining Realness, 2014) addresses issues of identity, insecurity, and self-discovery.
The book begins unconventionally at the door to a strip club in Hawaii where the author, a trans woman of color, recalls using a fake ID to get a stripper job to work her way through college. Much of how Mock conducts her life now was borne from mistakes made and lessons learned in her formative 20s, the time frame that the memoir primarily focuses on. The daughter of a native Hawaiian mother and a black father from Texas, she admits to being raised in an unorthodox family. After her parents divorced, her mother raised her with a “laissez-faire approach to parenting that enabled me to do whatever I wanted throughout my youth,” which included hormone therapy and, eventually, sex-reassignment surgery at age 18. At the strip club, she writes of being wholly “stealth” (seamlessly blending in as a trans woman), as were other girls there and on the streets where Mock hustled. As trying as those days seemed to her, they were also educational and afforded her time to become comfortable with and intimately acknowledge and appreciate her physicality and sexuality. Troy, a man she’d met at the club, would become the first love interest to whom she would disclose her trans status. Brimming with liberated self-discovery, Mock’s conversational memoir is smoothly written with plenty of insight and personal perspective, some of which is bittersweet, as when reflecting on her turbulent relationship with Troy: “Being alone is unbearable when you’ve enjoyed a reprieve with togetherness.” Though a traumatic sexual assault derailed her physical sense of security, journalism courses and a career redirection in New York City paved the way toward the celebrated media personality she has become today.
A defining chronicle of strength and spirit particularly remarkable for younger readers, both in transition or questioning.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4579-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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