With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics

With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and PoliticsNational Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical

National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir

Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman--Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self.
With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain she experienced living as the "wrong" gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real.
Ladin's poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn't, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 04/01/2008
ISBN: 9780299226800
Pages: 641
Weight: 2.27lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.24w x 1.69d

Review Citations: Library Journal 04/01/2008 pg. 97