Transitions … reviewed by Jason

Pride Week Book Review

Life is filled with transitions of all kinds; but beyond any doubt, one of the most difficult and wrenching transitions a person can go through is gender transition. Within the past few years, there has been an explosion of books dealing with gender identity issues, specifically transgender people who transition. These include histories, social and political issues and personal biographies. It’s the personal stories that vividly illustrate the struggles and triumphs of those who going through gender transition.

Chaz Bono publicly announced his transition in 2009; his biography, Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man, was released this past spring along with a web forum and documentary. In Transition, Bono describes his tumultuous youth as the “daughter” of two celebrity parents, and later on, his controversial coming out as a lesbian to both his family and the public. But, the undercurrent of something else, still unresolved, underlies much of his book, until the point at which he finally realized he was actually a man. Struggling with the grief of losing his father and a partner, and recovering from an addiction, Bono began to confront himself and then, the challenging process of coming out, once again, before transitioning.

If Chaz Bono had been an adult in the 1940s, his difficult struggle would been nearly impossible. This is illustrated in the story of Michael Dillon in Pagan Kennedy’s The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution. Dillon’s awareness of himself as a male trapped in a female body, as is typical, started when he was very young; but being young in the early twentieth-century meant growing up in a world with almost no scientific knowledge of what a transgender person was and in a society where people feared difference from the norm. Dillon began to present in a masculine fashion in university, transitioning just after the Second World War. Kennedy’s book is also about Roberta Cowell, a former RAF bomber and a transgender woman who heard about Dillon’s writings on gender reassignment surgery and sought his advice. Unfortunately, Dillon’s story does not end well; he died in 1963, on a Buddhist retreat in the Himalayas, alone, having struggled against society’s prejudices in order to settle down to a career and a family as a man, but such were the times.

Transparent: Love, Family and Living The T with Transgender Teenagers, by freelance writer Cris Beam, is the illuminating and heart-wrenching story of Beam’s work as a volunteer at an inner-city school for LGBTQ youth in Los Angeles; it is here where she took four transgender teenage girls under her wing. We see the girls’ struggles with living in poverty, or on the streets, and being transgender. Along the way, they deal with abusive families, street gangs, unstable employment and, in one case, incarceration. Beam tells her story while giving voice to those of the girls, with all the anxiety, warmth and compassion of a mother concerned for her daughters in a world fraught with fear and violence.

Have you read any other LGBTQ-related books? Feel free to comment.

Happy Pride Week!

The Cellist of Sarajevo … reviewed by Lilypearl

BC Day Book Review

I wanted to read a book to celebrate BC Day.  A friend of mine suggested The Cellist of Sarajevo.  Not only is this book written by a Canadian, the author resides with his family in New Westminster.

It is a time of civil war.  Snipers are stationed in the hills of Sarajevo; their duty is to shoot anyone in the city below.  Whether it be a person helping another, fetching water or speaking to another every simple act takes on the appearance of a game of chance.

Taking their chances are three individuals: Kenan, who takes his walk to collect water for his family, Dragan, who is in searching for food, and Arrow, a sniper attempting to protect the city and it’s people from further atrocities.

A cellist witnesses twenty-two people killed while waiting in line to receive bread.  The Cellist makes a vow that for the next twenty-two days he will play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of them.

While the Cellist plays for his own reasons, others who watch and listen interpret the performance in their own way.  In reading the book, my sense was that the cellist gave each performance in part to bring a sense of normalcy, comfort and calmness to a place where such things have been taken away.

Have you read this or another book by a BC author? Feel free to comment or suggest other titles.

Sister and I: From Victoria to London … reviewed by Ann

BC Day Book Review

This 92-page illustrated journal was created by Emily Carr in 1910 during a two-month journey she took with her sister Alice across Canada by CPR train and then on the SS Empress of Ireland across the Atlantic to England.

I love the caricature-style watercolour sketches that accompany the text. Some of the drawings I especially enjoyed are:

·       Emily removing quills from Billie dog after his encounter with a porcupine.

·       Poignant sketch of Billie dog staring at a closed door after being left in Edmonton during Emily’s travels.

·       Alice and Emily trying to sleep on the train with lovers sitting in front of them and a man behind enjoying their bag of peaches.

·       Emily on her knees, bum in the air and nose to the carpet, trying to sniff out the origins of a stain.

·       Cowering CPR employee being confronted by Emily as to the whereabouts of her luggage.

In these whimsical sketches Emily portrays herself as a plump, dowdy matron, and her sister Alice as thin and neat with a long nose.

The accompanying text on the trials and tribulations of their travels is funny and kept me amused during a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Be sure to read the informative foreword: “A Gem in a Steamer Trunk” by Kathryn Bridge. It provides interesting background about Emily, her travels, her art, and her attitudes.

Have you read this or another BC book? Feel free to comment or suggest other titles.

Getting Rid of Bradley … reviewed by Silvana

This book, by Jennifer Crusie, comes under the umbrella of “chick lit”, which is really not my first love in reading.  But someone introduced me to Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, which I  couldn’t put down, so I thought I’d read another one of hers. 

Getting Rid of Bradley is about a high school physics teacher, Lucy Savage, who has been living a lie of a marriage. Her husband doesn’t really love her – she catches him in bed with another woman.  And unbeknownst to her, he’s part of an embezzlement scheme; it eventually all catches up to Lucy when she is shot at!  Sound confusing?  It is.

In all this, Lucy, the good girl, becomes involved with one of the officers, Zach Warren, the good looking “bad boy”.   Does she or doesn’t she give in to her fantasies?

Can he save her?  Read it and find out.

Have you read it? Feel free to comment.

Factory Girls – reviewed by Ron (patron)

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been moving from from the countryside to the city. This process arrived very late in China, because of national isolation under the Emperors then under the Communists, but today, the Chinese are making up for their lateness with sheer numbers and speed. In recent years, 130 million people have moved from rural China to its coastal factory cities. This is the largest migration in human history.

Leslie Chang’s book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, draws us into this world, not through studies or statistics, though she tells us about some of these, but primarily through the personal stories of young Chinese women who (being less desirable in today’s China than their brothers) make up the majority of the migrants who have been swept up in this massive socioeconomic tsunami.

The individual stories are amazing. Because of the Wild West trade mentality in these cities, you meet young women who’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams – if only temporarily, until the rule of law catches up with them. You meet sad, innocent women turned to prostitution with no way to go back home, and women who stay in the industrial system and bear up against an existence straight out of Charles Dickens while trying as best they can to create a life of their own. Others go home, giving up on an astoundingly better material life, lonely and taken advantage of one too many times, and you wonder if they aren’t the lucky ones.

The most amazing thing about this book, is to feel yourself witnessing the journey of such a mass of humanity – travelling, literally, from feudalism to the neoliberal state in the course of a train ride. Not all these travellers, but most it seems, are hardened into a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish, and short. As China develops its naval and nuclear powers you wonder what the next generation of Chinese youth will grow up to become, and how we might be able to influence that in ways that will maximize global happiness.

Have you read this book? Feel free to comment.