nature versus nurture. (First printing of 125,000; Literary Guild super release; author tour)
Born a boy, brought up a girl, David Thiessen always knew in his genes that he was a male, despite his eminent doctor's
self-serving pronouncements. Colapinto, the reporter who won a National Magazine Award for a piece on David's story, engrossingly recounts this tale of grotesque medical hubris and a life dragged slowly from the ashes. 30 years ago, David—a pseudonym used in review galleys, his actual name to be revealed upon publication—"lost his entire penis to a botched circumcision." When he was just a year old, John Money, M.D., a pioneer in transsexual surgery at Johns Hopkins, convinced David’s parents to have the boy’s sex changed, arguing that subsequent social, mental, and hormonal conditioning would turn him into a happy woman. Publicly and falsely touted as an unqualified success, David’s case—exploited as a gaudy feather in the cap of nurturists over naturists, proof that the gender gap was not biological but environmental—ushered in a period when sex-reassignment surgery became standard treatment in situations where newborns had injured or irregular genitals. David, on the other hand, was deeply confused about his gender identity long before his operation was disclosed to him. He suffered the cruelty of peers who didn't appreciate his tomboyism, had few friends but his identical-twin brother (who makes a fascinating comparative profile), and came to dread any contact with Money, a bully who deployed "pressure tactics, cajoling, pornography, and unorthodox inspections and posings" when Brenda, as David was known, resisted further surgery. As soon as David learned his birth sex, he applied for phalloplasty and began to pick up the pieces of his malignantly manipulated life. Colapinto's storytelling, taut and emotive, never plays the grim tale for its sideshow qualities, nor claims the last word on
nature versus nurture. (First printing of 125,000; Literary Guild super release; author tour)Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019211-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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