Provocative and illuminating—a winning follow-up to McBee’s acclaimed debut.
A journalist’s account of why he decided to train as a boxer and become the first transgender man to fight a cisgender man in Madison Square Garden.
McBee (Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, 2014) began his transition to manhood at age 30. Although he loved the new coherence between his inner and outer selves, he was also aware that becoming a man also meant becoming an heir to toxic masculinity. He searched for “good men” to imitate until the day his girlfriend suggested that his real task was “to face [his] worst fears about who [he was]” rather than seeking outside role models. With her words in mind, he decided to take up boxing at a local New York gym to better understand the “brutal intimacies” of male relationships. He cleared his first inner hurdle by coming out to his trainers and earning their respect for his honesty. At the same time, the author also became “wary of [the] new…warrior-like ego” he saw emerge within himself. He then signed up to fight in a charity match at MSG, and he continued to work through his remaining fears about masculinity, many of which surfaced during sessions with a female boxer. She threatened him not only because she was a better fighter, but also because she forced him to grapple with his own internalized sexism and romanticized notions of manhood. Training with her eventually made him understand that he could actively rewrite inherited social scripts about masculinity. McBee also realized a core truth about men and boxing: Males seeking out other males to learn the art of fighting were not necessarily seeking blood or violence. Rather, they were looking for a bond by exposing vulnerabilities and learning to overcome their deficits within the protected space of the gym or boxing ring. In this lyrical, courageous book, the author eloquently probes his inner life as he searches for the meaning of gender identity in a world limited by binary thinking.
Provocative and illuminating—a winning follow-up to McBee’s acclaimed debut.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6874-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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