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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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