Book Reviews

When the doctors confirmed that I was intersex, I thought, Wow, I’m that whole other gender! It proved what I had been feeling all along. I was not only emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually both sexes; I was physically both sexes too. This is who I am. My mom was still in denial. She kept asking why I didn’t have a boyfriend.

             from Beyond Magenta

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt…Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.

             from An Immense World

This was the beginning of the transition, of letting go, though Roland had never heard anyone speak of it, this form of parental dismay. You think of your child as your dependent. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependent too. It had always cut both ways.

                        from Lessons

We overuse adjectives such as luminous, dazzling, incandescent, stunning, shimmering, sparkling, glittering—always the light references! Or there are what I like to call “the natural disaster adjectives:” devastating, searing, powerful, shattering, explosive, epic, electrifying…One wag on social media recently compiled a “glossary of terms” for book blurbs, including “Enchanting: there’s a dog in it. Heartwarming: a dog and a child. Moving: child dies. Heartrending: dog dies.” We laugh because we know it’s true…that these words act as a code of sorts.

            from Blurb Your Enthusiasm

Like others at the time, Burton and Speke were unapologetic in their racism, with all of its attendant arrogance and ignorance, but they were sickened by the slave trade, which, Burton wrote, “had made a howling desert of the land,” and took great pride in their country’s efforts to end it. But […] little had changed in East Africa, where the shackling and selling of human beings was still a common occurrence. “Zanzibar is a peculiar place,” Burton wrote a friend. “An admirable training ground for damnation.”

            from River of the Gods

(Damon Thruff looking through Mama Z’s files of lynchings since 1913)

“You did all this?” Damon asked.
Mama Z poured the tea. “Yes.”
“It’s incredible,” he said.
“I have chronicled the work of the devil.”
“The devil?”
“I don’t believe in a god, Mr. Thruff. You can’t sit here in this room, touch all these folders, read all of these pages, and believe in a god. I do, however, and I’m certain you do, too, believe in the devil.”
“And hell?”
“This is hell, Mr. Thruff. Haven’t you been watching?”

            from The Trees