A wonderfully clear and convincing guide to comprehending and defending gender diversity.
Understanding the realities of gender identities.
In this remarkable book, Bailar, the first trans athlete to play a sport on an NCAA Division 1 men’s team and now a prominent advocate for trans rights, reflects on his experiences as a trans man and explains how we might best comprehend and discuss gender identity. In four sections, the author provides definitions of critical concepts related to gender, recommendations about ways to discuss complex and sensitive issues, scientifically informed debunking of common misconceptions, and guidance about how trans individuals and their allies can successfully navigate the challenges of an often transphobic society. Along the way, Bailar astutely unpacks the assumptions informing key debates that have become flashpoints in the nation’s culture wars: the appropriateness of surgery and hormone treatments for young people; the participation of trans individuals in sports; the politics of bathrooms; the significance of pronoun use; and the relationship between trans identities and mental illness. Among the many strengths of this book is the author’s patient, informed unfolding of his arguments. Though his claims are obviously deeply held and passionately rendered, Bailar refrains from polemics and remains generous toward those who might disagree. Another key point is the author’s linking of transphobia to other forms of prejudice and indictment of deep-seated cultural anxieties about gender and sexual orientation. Trans individuals, he writes, “are a threat because our very identities disrupt the most basic conventions of Western society: cis white patriarchal power—the system of oppression that has built and controlled this country since its inception…we know ourselves even when those in power say it is impossible for us to exist.” Bailar’s appeals for understanding could not be timelier, given the recent rise of anti-trans legislation as well as anti-trans violence. For those seeking such understanding, this is an invaluable resource.
A wonderfully clear and convincing guide to comprehending and defending gender diversity.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780306831874
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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