A useful resource for people exploring their own gender identities, as well as for their families and friends.
Advocates Rajunov and Duane gather 30 short first-person essays about the experience of “discovering, defining, contracting, creating, and experiencing gender in a unique way.”
The editors cover a lot of ground in this collection. Abigail describes parenting her agender child, and Jules De La Cruz, whose wife was pregnant at the time De La Cruz wrote the essay, considers how “mother” and “father” are inadequate terms for nonbinary parents. In discussing her journey, CK Combs examines the process of “building an authentic understanding of misogyny and feminism, and the ability to step into male privilege with that knowledge.” Sand C. Chang offers one of the more creatively structured essays, first offering a sort of micro-essay on the various meanings of the word “token” and then taking up the form of a daily calendar entry to capture “A Day in the Life of a Nonbinary Gender Therapist.” Threading throughout the book is the theme of questioning, exploration, journey, and process: As Combs suggests, the “What are you?” question may be best answered in the present, and answering may never be a completed task. Many essays touch on the power of clothing to concoct and disrupt gender identity; on experiences, positive and negative, of working with therapists; and on the exhaustion of “passing” and “gender fatigue.” Religion also features: Jaye Ware describes being rejected by—and rejecting—church. Avery Erickson reports from a Buddhist retreat. Looking around the communal male bathroom, Erickson felt “a sense of otherness” bubbling up, but it was apt that this feeling should emerge at a retreat because “I came to this retreat…to see what is true” and “to be aware of this life and be with this moment, just as they are.” Erickson shows that the Zen idea of “ ‘simultaneous inclusion’ of the relative and the absolute” may be a good metaphor—or even grammar—for gender identity.
A useful resource for people exploring their own gender identities, as well as for their families and friends.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-18533-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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