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SURPASSING CERTAINTY

Name: SURPASSING CERTAINTY
Author: Janet Mock
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4579-7

WHAT MY TWENTIES TAUGHT ME

by Janet Mock ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017

A defining chronicle of strength and spirit particularly remarkable for younger readers, both in transition or questioning.

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Journalist and TV television host Mock’s second memoir (Redefining Realness, 2014) addresses issues of identity, insecurity, and self-discovery.

The book begins unconventionally at the door to a strip club in Hawaii where the author, a trans woman of color, recalls using a fake ID to get a stripper job to work her way through college. Much of how Mock conducts her life now was borne from mistakes made and lessons learned in her formative 20s, the time frame that the memoir primarily focuses on. The daughter of a native Hawaiian mother and a black father from Texas, she admits to being raised in an unorthodox family. After her parents divorced, her mother raised her with a “laissez-faire approach to parenting that enabled me to do whatever I wanted throughout my youth,” which included hormone therapy and, eventually, sex-reassignment surgery at age 18. At the strip club, she writes of being wholly “stealth” (seamlessly blending in as a trans woman), as were other girls there and on the streets where Mock hustled. As trying as those days seemed to her, they were also educational and afforded her time to become comfortable with and intimately acknowledge and appreciate her physicality and sexuality. Troy, a man she’d met at the club, would become the first love interest to whom she would disclose her trans status. Brimming with liberated self-discovery, Mock’s conversational memoir is smoothly written with plenty of insight and personal perspective, some of which is bittersweet, as when reflecting on her turbulent relationship with Troy: “Being alone is unbearable when you’ve enjoyed a reprieve with togetherness.” Though a traumatic sexual assault derailed her physical sense of security, journalism courses and a career redirection in New York City paved the way toward the celebrated media personality she has become today.

A defining chronicle of strength and spirit particularly remarkable for younger readers, both in transition or questioning.

Pub Date: June 13, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5011-4579-7

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.