An honest and helpfully specific journey through a life that has taken some unexpected turns, of interest to all open-minded...
Styles, who began transitioning from male to female at age 30 in 2012, looks back over the path of her life from childhood up to the present.
In her first book, the British author, who was the transgender columnist for Elle U.K. from 2015 to 2017, reaches out to readers who wonder about the often awkward and confusing process of transitioning. She begins with memories of growing up in rural England in the 1980s, often switching “between the roles of girl and boy in my head, unsure of which one felt more secure.” Young Ryan—who changed his name to Rhyannon when he began transitioning—liked to dress in girls' clothes and wear makeup and felt at home with the girls in his primary school. Bullied as an early teen, he found a home later in adolescence with other teens involved in art and music and then went on to London to study jewelry making in art school. For a while, the author satisfied his desire to dress as a woman by performing in drag shows. Eventually, however, he wanted a more permanent and less showy change, so he began to communicate with his family, whom he had previously kept in the dark about his gender identity. Though generally upbeat, Styles also reveals a more tormented side in a chapter called “The B-Side,” which details long periods of depression and drug and alcohol abuse, eventually abated through 12-step programs. She describes in cheerful detail the process of transitioning, including the effects of hormones on her body and personality, both positive and negative, and she details her present state of indecision about just how far to go with transition. Her acceptance of a fluid identity should be comforting for readers who feel out of place in a cultural system that divides gender into traditional male and female roles.
An honest and helpfully specific journey through a life that has taken some unexpected turns, of interest to all open-minded readers and especially to transgender individuals and those who care about them.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4722-4258-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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 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
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