A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community.
A trans author presents a discussion about being trans in a cis world.
Anyone can be trans, from entertainers to cashiers to members of one’s family, notes Radclyffe. Why, then, he asks, has discourse around this topic “become a pinball machine” in which trans people are the ball, ricocheting against the walls? Radclyffe asserts that it’s partly a matter of perspective. Some voices are simply louder, he notes—journalism, politics, and religion are largely cisgender domains. Using his own personal experience, wit, and enthusiasm, the author guides his readers to viewpoints that may be new to them. On the subject of trans kids competing in sports, he invites readers into the mind of a child on a soccer team. The child has body dysmorphia but is happy and at peace with her teammates. To ban her from playing, the author says, means only considering the feelings of cis people who feel threatened. At another point, the author explains that he didn’t transition from one sex to another, but “changed my body to become itself.” Overall, Radclyffe presents an empathetic and insistent work that effectively brings clarity to several topics for people who might lack it. For example, he uses an analogy of sheep in pens to illustrate a “binary world, where the two sexes are separated off from each other. There is no migration, there are no gates between the fields, and the fences never move.” He points out that such thinking is limiting (“Why can’t we just have full run of the countryside?”) and driven by misogyny, and he clearly expresses his belief that all feminists should embrace trans rights, because the “mythical hierarchy of female weakness / inferiority and male strength / superiority can only exist if the two sexes remain separate.” He also notes the many gender identities to choose from beyond the binary male/female option (Radclyffe posits that there are between 72 and 93). In addition, the book contextualizes such often-misunderstood topics as gender therapy and gender-affirming surgery.
A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798987019979
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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