The mother of a gender creative child reflects on the unique path of his development from childhood to adulthood.
Tarney’s son Harry was just 2 years old when he told her, “inside my head I’m a girl.” Uncertain what to make of her son’s statement or how to interpret his fondness for dolls and dressing up in girl’s clothes, the author looked for answers in the work of child experts like Benjamin Spock. However, no one could help her figure out how to keep her son psychologically healthy on one hand and free from peer teasing on the other. Terrified that she would become like her own controlling mother, Tarney tried to find or create environments that offered Harry a maximum of personal expressive freedom. Rather than send him to a uniform-mandatory school, she chose one where children could wear what they liked. At home, she gave Harry full freedom to dress up in wigs, skirts, dresses, and high-heeled shoes and indulge in his penchant for performance. As he approached his middle school years, Harry began to face the inevitable hurtful comments of classmates who called him “needle dick” and “faggot.” But he learned to cope with homophobia, first by excelling academically and then by learning how to channel his dramatic abilities and love of the outrageous in ways that eventually made him one of the most popular people in high school. Harry’s own development into a confident, self-loving person inspired Tarney to follow her own dreams away from Milwaukee to live the life of a free spirit in Brooklyn. Not only does the book chronicle an especially memorable mother-son relationship. It also suggests that the best parenting is the kind that does not forcibly mold a child into what he/she “should” be but lovingly allows him/her the freedom to follow his/her own special path.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31060-8
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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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