Reading McBride’s inspiring story will make it harder to ostracize or demonize others with similar stories to share.
A brave transgender woman experiences both triumph and tragedy in this memoir of transitioning and so much more.
McBride, the national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, was a high school political activist well before coming to terms with her gender identity, so this mix of policy discussion and personal revelation seems to come naturally to her. What she had never expected is that she would be a widow at 24 and, two years later, become the first transgender speaker at a national political convention. The author first came to national attention in college, when, as student body president of American University, she announced first through social media and then in the pages of the school newspaper that she was transgender. She had previously presented herself outwardly as male. She was scared of rejection or even ridicule from the campus culture, but she received “a total and overwhelming outpouring of love and joy.” However, McBride’s earlier experience coming out to her parents had been more traumatic. Even though they were progressive and supportive of her gay older brother, they had been blindsided by her declaration. “So you want to be a girl?” asked her tearful mother, who later said, “I feel like my life is over.” “I didn’t want to be a girl. I was a girl,” thought the author, who had felt like a girl in a boy’s body since she was 10 and who had since recognized that if this were in fact a choice, it was the only choice she could make. She became an activist and eloquent spokesperson for LGBTQ legislation, the first transgender intern to serve at the White House, and an inspirational speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She also fell deeply in love with another activist, who would soon succumb to cancer, but not before they had the chance to marry. Throughout, the author ably balances great accomplishments and strong emotions.
Reading McBride’s inspiring story will make it harder to ostracize or demonize others with similar stories to share.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6147-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 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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