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ramonamead's review against another edition
2.0
DNF Don't get me wrong, this is an interesting concept. Faludi reconnects with her father after 24 years of estrangement after receiving an email from him announcing he'd had gender reassignment surgery and was now a woman. She goes to visit her father, now Stephanie, and begins her exploration of what led her father on this journey. I enjoyed the beginning of the book, it flowed well then it simply got too dense for me. There's a lot of world history as well as social science type information. It wasn't as straightforward of a memoir/biography as I expected.
penser's review against another edition
While I found the narrative around her relationship with her father interesting, I found the in depth parts about the Hungarian history to be slow and thick.
moreadsbooks's review against another edition
3.0
"Totalism, Erick Erikson had cautioned, could set in when the search for identity becomes an insistence on a 'category-to-be-made-absolute,' displacing psychological complexity and self-awareness. Instead of teasing out the component desires and conflicts and injuries that shape a personality, instead of inspecting (and confronting) the social and economic conditions and history that form and deform individuals lives, identity could dangle the dangerous panacea of a single global fix. Could a nation succumb to the same temptation? What happens when a government champions a unitary image as a substituite for reckoning with its country's real historical baggage and grappling with its citizens' real problems? The political equivalent of totalism was totalitarianism."
It seems reductive on my part to tie this book into the current state of affairs in America, considering that it is at its heart a very carefully wrought, poignant story of Susan Faludi struggling to create a relationship with her estranged father after the latter surprises her with news of a sex change operation, but given Stefáni (nee Steven) Faludi's experience as a Hungarian Jew during WWII, it's also impossible not to draw parallels. Either way, although a section about Hungary's history near the beginning was dry (and horrifying in retrospect), I'm glad that I read this. Here is the most asinine thing I think I've ever written, but there are a lot of things that I don't know & I've been reading primarily non-fiction this year because I want to know as much as I can. Did I about Hungary's ruthless, shameful actions during WWII? No, but I do now, and that knowledge creates another facet of context that I'll carry with me from now on. I lately have this thirst to fill my brain up with everything I possibly can.
It seems reductive on my part to tie this book into the current state of affairs in America, considering that it is at its heart a very carefully wrought, poignant story of Susan Faludi struggling to create a relationship with her estranged father after the latter surprises her with news of a sex change operation, but given Stefáni (nee Steven) Faludi's experience as a Hungarian Jew during WWII, it's also impossible not to draw parallels. Either way, although a section about Hungary's history near the beginning was dry (and horrifying in retrospect), I'm glad that I read this. Here is the most asinine thing I think I've ever written, but there are a lot of things that I don't know & I've been reading primarily non-fiction this year because I want to know as much as I can. Did I about Hungary's ruthless, shameful actions during WWII? No, but I do now, and that knowledge creates another facet of context that I'll carry with me from now on. I lately have this thirst to fill my brain up with everything I possibly can.
sdbecque's review against another edition
4.0
I love Susan Faludi's other books, specifically [b:Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man|200884|Stiffed The Betrayal of the American Man|Susan Faludi|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1442173779s/200884.jpg|969699] and [b:The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America|723244|The Terror Dream Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America|Susan Faludi|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1316126301s/723244.jpg|709477] so I wanted to read this before I really knew anything about it. It seems almost crazy, a person known for writing long form journalistic books about gender, and who wrote one of the most engaging books I've ever read on American masculinity in the post-war period has a father she hasn't spoken to in 25 years randomly email her and announce that he has undergone sex reassignment surgery and is now living as a woman. This book is part memoir, part history, constructed as Faludi spent the next decade trying to repair her relationship with her father. Her father, Stefanie, is inscrutable and impossible to pin down. Stefanie is also a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust, depending on which story is to be believed, on a combination of luck, daring, bravery and convincing role-playing. Faludi weaves her father's story in with the history of Hungary, especially the Hungarian Jewery, around questions of identity, gender and religion. It is a beautiful and haunting book.
shanaries's review against another edition
3.0
The story that I was most interested in didn't begin until part II. I struggled with the slowness of the Hungarian history that dominated part I. In part II, Faludi presents a fair amount of identity research and ponders a great deal of questions; this is the author that I most wanted to see when I first read a blurb about this book some time ago. Much of the background dealing with Hungary dragged on for me. I found bits interesting but, again, it wasn't the story I was reading for. The emotional distance between Faludi and her father is palpable throughout. As a result, I felt mildly bummed out pretty much from cover-to-cover. If I were to recommend to a friend, I'd suggest they start at part II unless they're totally into the slow-burning history of Hungary.
obiebyke's review against another edition
3.0
This book was as much a projection of Susan Faludi's own resentment and complexes as it was about her father's life and gender. Clever and curious to use the Holocaust and Hungarian history and present to frame trans hiding and trauma. She was occasionally offensive but with such transparent insecurity at the root that I wasn't terribly disturbed.
archytas's review against another edition
4.0
This is in some ways, a very brave book to write. It is an extraordinary story: the story of a trans woman, holocaust survivor and violent father. Any of these 'identities' is usually explored for what it can tell us about the generic experience, what the holocaust, or gender or gendered violence mean. But the astonishing thing about this book, is that Faludi resolutes marches past such thing, in a dogged and yearning search for insight of her father. The book in the end, is more about the impossibility of ever knowing another person, than it is about war, genocide or gender, even though it twines into and out of those topics. With abundant field of her favourite political topics to chew on, Faludi instead has produced an intensely personal portrait of an inscrutable survivor.
Which is not to say that Faludi has nothing to say about gender or the holocaust. The book discusses Faludi's plunge, once her father Stefanie had revealed her gender transition, into reading every trans memoir she could find, and her bewilderment with the gender essentialism in some of it, and her comfort level with the ideas of gender fluidity in others. But this discussion is for Faludi, a tool to help her understand something about her father's experience, never an attempt to generalise beyond, but to bring the general to inform the specific. There are numerous points in the book, specifically, where Faludi draws the reader's attention to how atypical her father is - of trans women, of Jews, of holocaust survivors.
The holocaust material, which is covered at more length in the book, is similarly specific. For this alone, Faludi's struggle to make sense of what impact an adolescence spent hiding in plain sight, walking among the barely alive, and the not-alive: in short, surviving genocide, might have done to a young person already abandoned by divided parents.
Stefanie rarely emerges in a sympathetic tone. She whirls through the book with self-obsessed energy, alternately posing distractions from uncomfortable questions, and flying into emotional intensity triggered by memories too strong to bear. Faludi is candid about the violence she saw, and was subjected to, and how this influenced her political views. But she also softly treads around the deep hurts, the ingrained deceptions, that came out of experiences more traumatic than she can understand.
Part of the strength of the book, is that in doing so, much of Faludi herself is stripped bare. Her dogged pursuit of her father, her desperation to *know*, and need to intellectualise, her hurt and guardedness with a parent who left her with scars. Their relationship is at the heart of the book, and Faludi's attempts to come to terms with living with ambiguity and hurt is perhaps the most emotionally satisfying sequence in the book.
I loved that this story is not of a heroic and wise holocaust survivor, or a tear-jerking triumphant trans survivor, or a repentant abuser. So often our boxes for those who go through experiences are rigid, and deny the participants humanity or difference. Stefanie bursts through all these boxes and preconceptions, refusing to be a poster-child for anything, or to exist to teach us anything (despite her daughter's pursuit of one, to some extent).
This wasn't at all what I expected, but it felt like a privilege to read. Stefanie's story is extraordinary and compelling, thrilling, infuriating and melancholy, and Faludi is one hell of a writer, and a person.
Which is not to say that Faludi has nothing to say about gender or the holocaust. The book discusses Faludi's plunge, once her father Stefanie had revealed her gender transition, into reading every trans memoir she could find, and her bewilderment with the gender essentialism in some of it, and her comfort level with the ideas of gender fluidity in others. But this discussion is for Faludi, a tool to help her understand something about her father's experience, never an attempt to generalise beyond, but to bring the general to inform the specific. There are numerous points in the book, specifically, where Faludi draws the reader's attention to how atypical her father is - of trans women, of Jews, of holocaust survivors.
The holocaust material, which is covered at more length in the book, is similarly specific. For this alone, Faludi's struggle to make sense of what impact an adolescence spent hiding in plain sight, walking among the barely alive, and the not-alive: in short, surviving genocide, might have done to a young person already abandoned by divided parents.
Stefanie rarely emerges in a sympathetic tone. She whirls through the book with self-obsessed energy, alternately posing distractions from uncomfortable questions, and flying into emotional intensity triggered by memories too strong to bear. Faludi is candid about the violence she saw, and was subjected to, and how this influenced her political views. But she also softly treads around the deep hurts, the ingrained deceptions, that came out of experiences more traumatic than she can understand.
Part of the strength of the book, is that in doing so, much of Faludi herself is stripped bare. Her dogged pursuit of her father, her desperation to *know*, and need to intellectualise, her hurt and guardedness with a parent who left her with scars. Their relationship is at the heart of the book, and Faludi's attempts to come to terms with living with ambiguity and hurt is perhaps the most emotionally satisfying sequence in the book.
I loved that this story is not of a heroic and wise holocaust survivor, or a tear-jerking triumphant trans survivor, or a repentant abuser. So often our boxes for those who go through experiences are rigid, and deny the participants humanity or difference. Stefanie bursts through all these boxes and preconceptions, refusing to be a poster-child for anything, or to exist to teach us anything (despite her daughter's pursuit of one, to some extent).
This wasn't at all what I expected, but it felt like a privilege to read. Stefanie's story is extraordinary and compelling, thrilling, infuriating and melancholy, and Faludi is one hell of a writer, and a person.