A memoir infused with personality and the ballsy honesty of someone for whom becoming a man was “the most natural thing in...
Sublime confidence and spirit distinguishes this unorthodox memoir of gender and identity.
Novelist Cooper (The Beaufort Diaries, 2010, etc.) establishes his point of view early on when describing himself as a droll, outspoken, Jewish, darker-skinned man who has undergone gender reassignment surgery. Wholly at ease in his own skin, he unleashes a flood of provocatively opinionated, informative slices of his life as a fully transitioned female-to-male American. With lively writing throughout, Cooper presents haiku pieces, childhood memories and the “sitting down to urinate” debate creatively interwoven with frank discussions of transgender violence, poignant commentary from his wife, who constantly fears for her husband’s safety (they live in a “decidedly conservative and religious” Southern state), and the author’s innermost fears. Cooper also shares varied versions of a revealing 2009 letter to his parents explaining how their daughter is now (and has always been) “basically a dude.” Extended interviews with “seasoned tranny” Kate Bornstein, Cooper’s brother (a member of the LAPD) and the parents of other transgendered acquaintances are probing, entertaining and revealing. The author’s inner journey toward self-awareness seems to have been relatively smooth, other than a series of conversational minefields he encounters regularly when discussing his gender identity with others. But chapters on his own personal confusion and uncertainty demonstrate a distinct consciousness for the paradoxical nature of the transgender experience at large.
A memoir infused with personality and the ballsy honesty of someone for whom becoming a man was “the most natural thing in the world.”Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-938073-00-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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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