Provocative and illuminating—a winning follow-up to McBee’s acclaimed debut.
A journalist’s account of why he decided to train as a boxer and become the first transgender man to fight a cisgender man in Madison Square Garden.
McBee (Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man, 2014) began his transition to manhood at age 30. Although he loved the new coherence between his inner and outer selves, he was also aware that becoming a man also meant becoming an heir to toxic masculinity. He searched for “good men” to imitate until the day his girlfriend suggested that his real task was “to face [his] worst fears about who [he was]” rather than seeking outside role models. With her words in mind, he decided to take up boxing at a local New York gym to better understand the “brutal intimacies” of male relationships. He cleared his first inner hurdle by coming out to his trainers and earning their respect for his honesty. At the same time, the author also became “wary of [the] new…warrior-like ego” he saw emerge within himself. He then signed up to fight in a charity match at MSG, and he continued to work through his remaining fears about masculinity, many of which surfaced during sessions with a female boxer. She threatened him not only because she was a better fighter, but also because she forced him to grapple with his own internalized sexism and romanticized notions of manhood. Training with her eventually made him understand that he could actively rewrite inherited social scripts about masculinity. McBee also realized a core truth about men and boxing: Males seeking out other males to learn the art of fighting were not necessarily seeking blood or violence. Rather, they were looking for a bond by exposing vulnerabilities and learning to overcome their deficits within the protected space of the gym or boxing ring. In this lyrical, courageous book, the author eloquently probes his inner life as he searches for the meaning of gender identity in a world limited by binary thinking.
Provocative and illuminating—a winning follow-up to McBee’s acclaimed debut.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6874-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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
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