A funny, sharply observed, and intelligent journey into self-identity.
A gender nonconforming writer and performer debuts with a memoir about growing into the “most effervescent, gorgeous, dignified sissy that the world has ever seen.”
From early childhood, Tobia’s “femininity came as naturally as my masculinity.” But in a household defined by a “mundane, practical masculinity,” Tobia found few avenues for self-expression. Once in preschool, the author found that gender identity was so heavily policed by parents, teachers, and other children that they renounced all outward markers of femininity a few years later. Church—and specifically, the handbell choir—became a space that allowed Tobia to quietly "queen out.” The author also discovered another refuge among schoolmates whose tastes in anime and fantasy allowed them access to “lots of gay-leaning stuff: shows about sparkly dragons, cartoons about fairies, anime with buff shirtless dudes screaming in ecstasy as they shot their giant laser beams at other dudes.” Female high school friends gradually helped the author take their first steps toward accepting their homosexuality and femininity. But Tobia still faced opposition from others, including the members of their beloved church congregation. It was in the relative freedom of college at Duke that Tobia fought to claim their “femininity in the light of day.” By senior year, the author, who was a member of the Biden Foundation’s Advisory Council for Advancing LGBTQ Equality, became a respected, highly visible gender activist who proudly wore skirts and heels. Tobia’s “coming-of-gender” story about a trans identity that refuses to be contained within the cisgender masculine/feminine binary, is refreshing, courageous, and important. Though the author sometimes overdoes the self-congratulation and snarkiness, these flaws are more than overcome by the feisty candor and wit, especially when discussing their relationship with their parents and the church that at first rejected but then finally accepted Tobia’s sparkling “queer spirit.”
A funny, sharply observed, and intelligent journey into self-identity.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1882-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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