Product Description
"The Uninvited Dilemma" is different from the autobiographiesand clinical studies on transsexuality.It represents two years ofresearch involving carefully structured, in-depth personal interviewswith seventy-five transsexuals, consultations with members of themedical and mental health communities, and conversations with lovedones of transsexuals.This book will give you an understanding of thetrue nature of transsexuality.It is a remarkable reading experiencefor all who are interested in the human condition and and explorationof the most fundamental aspect of our humanity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Excellent Overview
The 'Uninvited Dilemma, A Question of Gender' is a compilation of responses to questionnaires filled out by transgender individuals.As such it is not the best book for those trying to find their way if they are transgender or for finding advice or guidance.However, it does give a lot of insight into those who are transgender and how some have felt about their transgenderism or their transsexuality.In this regard it can be helpful to compare one's own feelings and experiences with those interviewed for the book.

Not everything in this book pertains to anyone who is transgender and it tends to reflect those with the most serious internal feelings, but overall it is an excellent glimpse into what others have experienced or feel about their transgenderism.

The Uninvited Dilemma - A Review
Right up front the author says,"This book is about transsexuals."She then goes on to state, "The subject has received widespread publicity; but despite the headlines, little is known about the condition by the general public..."

Starting off with a set of definitions and descriptions she painstakingly stakes out her grounds for discussion and then carefully and methodically attempts to correct the misconceptions and to debunk the myths surrounding transsexualism.The early chapters of the book deal with the problems and experiences of transsexuals from the early years to adulthood.The final chapters deal primarily with the conclusions reached as a result ofher research and the many interviews she conducted.Although the period covered by her work is now almost twenty years old, some of her comments are timeless, being equally relevant to today's world as it was in the 1990's.For example, in Chapter 4 she states in part, "Certainly a society which can find its way to the moon and back has the ability to find fair, discrete, and equitable ways of helping a very small percentage of individuals cope with personal dilemmas without destroying their careers and human dignity.We have become such a wasteful, throwaway society, it comes as a shock to learn the price we pay when we squander our natural resources.Although we are sometimes our own worst enemy, human beings - men and women - are our most precious natural resource.Just as we exact a toll on the quality of our life when we carelessly trash our environment, society pays dearly when we heedlessly toss about human lives as if they were empty, used up cans and bottle."

Despite the fact that the book claims to be about transsexuals, a careful reading of the author's definitions, so important to an understanding of this work, it is equally about transgender persons, a term in use today which was not used when the book was written.

This book is a fascinating read which challenges us all to reevaluate our thoughts on gender.I recommended it highly to all who seek answers to problems associated with trans phenomena; transsexuals, transgenders, their families, their friends, service professionals, and the public in general.

The uninvited dilemma is a breath of fresh air.
I found the book to be thoroughly thought out and genuine. It truly answered many of my question where other books on the subject failed to answer.
I feel this book is a must for anyone who questions there gender and is looking for direct and to the point answers.

The writer took great pains to retain the authenticity of the interviews she held.

A Rational Outlook on an Irrational Subject
Transsexualism is a subject area where much of the literature is either very clinical, or very anecdotal.A topic where the only common theme among the books is how incredibly difficult it is to study a condition that is deeply internal and subjective to those who live with it.

Where this book stands out is the author's ability to provide a blend of researched, clinical information _and_ 'personal stories' together.This book provides an enormous amount of valuable information that goes beyond the individual stories of transsexuals, and picks out the common themes and presents them clearly and concisely for the reader.

If you want to read a transsexual's story, this is the wrong book.If, on the other hand, you wish to understand transsexualism and what it is, this book is unusually accessible.

Others have commented that this book is perhaps a bit dated - although its calendar age is fairly old, this is a topic area where truly good research is rare, and Ms. Stuart has done a superlative job of both research and writing.

Good basics, but slightly out of date
I was at first disappointed to discover that the book I had just purchased was 12 years old. So some of the terminology no longer is in use and some theories have been either refuted or more warmly embraced by the TG community in the years since this book was published. New theories have emerged that were not even discussed in this book, understandably.
However, her methodology and findings appear to be quite sound and have stood the test of time. Some ideas she proposes, which may have been unique or relatively fresh at the time, have now come to be common knowledge or understanding.
However, so much of what is in this book exists in greater detail in other, more updated books. I would recommend this for those wanting a comparative look back in time, but I believe more current publications would be much more beneficial to most readers. ... Read more

Product Description
In Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, Kim Fortuny argues that Bishop's travel poetry reveals a political and social consciousness that, until fairly recently, has largely been seen as absent from her poetry and her life. Fortuny argues that questions of travel bring up questions of form in Bishop’s poems. Moreover, because Bishop knows much about both travel and form, yet is particularly well versed in the latter, Bishop’s poetry sheds light on the ethical and political problems of modern travel from a vantage gained by a scrupulous and hard-won artistry.

Fortuny maintains that there is practical merit in paying close attention to the linguistic complexities of Bishop's poems. The textures of poems concerned with foreign travel—poems such as "Questions of Travel," "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance," "Crusoe in England," and "Santarém"—reveal a consciousness that is fundamentally social, in spite of the writer's reputation for Modernist and ahistorical reserve. Consequently, the heart of this study is a series of close readings of these poems, in which Fortuny teases out the nuances of Bishop's relationship to the world in which she lived and traveled, examining her "apolitical" poems through a political lens and encountering her poetic style as politically engaged itself.

Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel will appeal to Bishop scholars, literary scholars, and those with an interest in Modernist poetry. ... Read more

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Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, has long been seen as a woman determined by "Romantic" love. In this suggestive new look at her life, Kim Echlin shows that another-and powerful-source of her creativity was rooted in her fearless exploration of the female body and psyche-as daughter, lover of men and women, and mother of four children.Elizabeth Smart bucked tradition from the beginning. She left her bourgeois diplomatic circles in Ottawa to join bohemian artists in England, France and Mexico. When she fell in love with a British poet and became pregnant by him, she had her first baby in secret on the west coast of Canada and wrote the book that describes not only a love affair but a searing cycle of betrayal that leads to a woman’s new self-assertion. Through art and having a baby, Elizabeth Smart discovered both her voice and her autonomy-outside of convention.

The daring and pain and elusive moments of joy in this extraordinary life are told through Elizabeth Smart’s diaries, poetry and prose. Echlin brings new material to bear on this reflection including a hundred interviews with family, friends and work colleagues, as well as never before seen letters in which Smart reflects on birth and female creativity. She highlights Elizabeth Smart’s unwavering commitment to writing in a voice and aesthetic form that reflects authentic female experience. ... Read more

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Curse of Osiris By Elaine HopperZane Ryan broke Alexis' heart four years ago so she isn't pleased when he returns with a crazy story about saving her and the world from imminent doom. But when an Egyptian god with supernatural powers wants to marry and sacrifice her, her only hope is Zane.Reader Advisory: Contains a mildly explicit sex scene.Fate's Little Trick By Sheryl Hames TorresWhen fate robs Gemma of something precious it happens at Christmas. After losing her family and her hearing she runs to her childhood home to escape the pain around her. Can she keep fate at bay when the past comes back to haunt her just days before Christmas?Ghosts of Auld Lang Syne By Maureen McMahonStacey Christian and Peter Mansfield reunite to celebrate the new year with friends at a remote New England homestead. Are the incidents that befall the guests really just accidents? Why does the restless specter of a young woman walk the halls? And will Stacey and Peter finally acknowledge their true feelings for each other before it's too late?Haunted Hearts By Kim CoxWill Lana Malloy solve the twenty-year-old double murder of her great-aunt and her great-aunt's fiancé by Valentine's Day? If she can, they'll spend eternity together. If she can't, they'll be stuck as haunted hearts for another year.Mistletoe Medium By Elizabeth DelisiCan psychic Lottie Baldwin and the handsome new man in her life pool their talents and solve the mystery before the bandit strikes again?Valentine's Inn By Chris GroverAfter being injured in an automobile accident that killed three friends, Rianna Gordon hopes to erase the past by hiding herself away. She has no idea it's the past that holds the key to her happiness until one cold February morning when a stranger and a stray cat show up and she starts smelling violets everywhere she goes. ... Read more

Product Description
I don't know how old I was when I watched my mother's murder, nor do I know how old I am today.' The illegitimate daughter of a peasant and an American GI, Elizabeth Kim spent her early years as a social outcast in her village in the Korean countryside. Ostracized by their family and neighbours, she and her mother were regularly pelted with stones on their way home from the rice fields. Yet, there was a tranquil happiness in the intense bond between mother and daughter, until the day that Elizabeth's grandfather and uncle came to punish her mother from the dishonour she had brought on the family, and executed her in front of her daughter. Elizabeth was dumped in an orphanage in Seoul. After some time, she was lucky enough to be adopted by an American couple. But when she arrived in America, she found herself once again surrounded by fanaticism and prejudice. Elizabeth's mother had always told her that life was made up of ten thousand joys as well as ten thousand sorrows, and, supported by her loving daughter, and by a return to her Buddhist faith, she finally found a way to savour those joys, as well as the courage to exorcise the demons of her past.Amazon.com Review
Ten Thousand Sorrows starts with its young narrator watching her mother's murder; improbably, things go downhill from there. "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," Frank McCourt famously wrote in Angela's Ashes. But McCourt's hardscrabble youth looks like a walk in the park compared to the experiences of Elizabeth Kim. The child of an illicit union between a Korean mother and an American father, Kim grows up the object of disgust and contempt in rural Korea. As a honhyol, or mixed-race child, she isn't considered a person at all.

Yet her mother refuses to sell her into servitude, and for that show of compassion she pays with her life. In the harrowing scene that opens the book, Kim watches from a hiding place as her mother--the victim of a so-called honor killing--is hanged from a rafter: "All I could see through the bamboo slats were her bare feet, dangling in midair. I watched those milk-white feet twitch, almost with the rhythm of the Hwagwan-mu dance, and then grow still." Left alone in the world, without so much as a name or date of birth, Kim ends up in an orphanage where she spends hours on end locked in a crib that resembles a cage. Things ought to look up when an American couple adopts her. Instead, one form of abuse merely replaces another, as the pastor and his wife tell Kim that her mother "left her to die in a rice paddy" and immediately take away any toy or pet to which she develops an attachment. Later, Kim escapes into a young marriage (arranged, naturally, by her fundamentalist parents), only to find no refuge there either. Surely there is a special place in hell reserved for her husband, the kind of pathological sadist who becomes aroused only by inflicting pain.

By this point, the reader begins to feel like something of a sadist herself. It's a tribute to Kim's skill as a writer that we can't look away from her pain, even when it might feel more comfortable to do so. True, she does leave her husband, make herself a new life with her daughter, begin a journalism career without benefit of training or degree--all of which demonstrates an amazing tenacity and inner strength. Yet the latter half of the book employs the familiar vocabulary of healing without doing much to convince. Reconciled with her experiences, Kim doesn't necessarily seem to have finished processing them. Her book has all the raw urgency of a call to 911: it feels written for the author's very survival. --Chloe Byrne ... Read more

Customer Reviews (109)

Courageous Writer
A book which exposes brutality in the name of Jesus.Well written book in which the author struggles to keep the child in her alive.I could not put the book down because I could not believe people can be so inhumane.The world is turned upsidedown whereby the insane rule and the kind, good people are victims.

A Child Lost
Beautiful book but don't read it all at once because the agony of a child is a hard thing to handle.I have read some of the other reviews (some of which cite that there is no place in the book where a good memory of childhood is found)and I came away with the impression that such trauma so early in a child's life would most probably leave so much emotional and mental confusion that she only remembers the hard things.

The loss of her mother is most probably the hardest for her to deal with since it left her without the nurturing at a young age which then becomes the solid base for the adult.Over and over again we hear the little child crying for her mother.

It is the last part of the book which is the most frightening.I got the feeling that she has not resolved her horror of her childhood.There are too many suggestions of how she has planned her suicide(right down to the color of the ribbon in her hair when she is found).While she says that she feels better now; I question it. Anxiety if not relieved can beget anger; and sometimes this is turned against other people and sometimes it is turned inward toward the self.

Indeed, on page 219 she states, "I don't feel healed....there are many times when I feel utterly alone and terrified."I can only hope for her that in the future she rises from her past and writes about her ten thousand happinesses.

Audiobook: well considered
I bought and listened to the audiobook.It is narrated by the author Elizabeth Kim herself, and her voice gives weight to words' authenticity.I did not hear her whining or filled with self-pity.The book speaks plainly of her life as she experienced it, and that is how I hear it in her spoken voice. It's a moving story.

Mid-way through listening to "Thousand Sorrows" I came to Amazon and saw the attacks against Kim.I was stunned by both the problems with historical truth (Kim's problem) and the strident open anger (her critics' problem).When I finished the audio story I borrowed the hardback from my library.Now having both heard and read the book, and browsed through most of the reviews and comments here, I choose to accept the heart of Elizabeth's story: girl meets love; girl loses love from her mom, new parents, school, husband and especially herself; and eventually girl finds love, and appreciates love.I choose to accept the deep tragedy that spread through much of her life and in the end seems to have dissolved, mostly.I choose to think that the problems of veracity are problems of her editor's failure to amend a note at the front, warning us that this is a story of memory, and not objective history.I choose to believe that Kim did witness what she interpreted as an 'honor killing' and yet I wish that Kim's editor had not allowed the dust jacket and Chapter 19 emphasis on it -- like others, I have found no other references in available literature to honor killing in Korea.Yet, I do notice that many of the attacks in the press seem to originate and flow from one person, a graduate student in Washington state, a non-Korean.

Kim includes poetry here, of Blake and Millay and her own.The book flows like a dream.She does not reference time, but does refer to a childhood memory of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" ('65) and draft resistance ('67) and, as a young bride, 1974's "The Total Woman". She includes comments from her adult daughter, a welcome breath of air, and from it we know that Kim did not become too terrible a mother.Not bad, all things considered.

Liked the book - wonder about the truth
SPOILER ALERT

I really liked this book. It was sad but not too self-pitying. I was absolutely riveted to the story and found the image of her walking away from her husband moving. I got the sense that the author understands her strengths and shortcomings. The writing was simple but deep. I couldn't believe that she's still in contact with her parents!

I've tried to find out whether honor killings happened in Korea and haven't found any evidence of it on the web, but I've only done a rudimentary search. Does anybody have any concrete information on this?

About some of the facts. Lucy Grealy who wrote "Autobiography of a Face" was asked how she could have remembered all the conversations in her memoir. She replied that she had used educated guesses to make them up. Some people were shocked but it makes sense to me. Memoirs are not autobiographies, they don't have to be based on facts, just memories. I never read a memoir expecting to tell the complete story or even an accurate portrait. It's a point of view. Kim wrote a really good memoir, now I just want to find out more about Korea at that time.

a piece of work that comes from the heart
Sometimes, we don't know what is happening in the other parts of the world. Perhaps, we don't care. It is good to read something that is a true story and hear the story from the person who experienced the occasion personally. I love the way Elizabeth Kim tells the story. She described the situation well. It feels like we were actually there, watching her life being torn by someone else. ... Read more

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Contemporary Sculpture Exhibit Catalog of at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, October 2 - November 11, 1989 ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Kim(berley) (Elizabeth) Caraher, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thomson Gale. The length of the entry is 471 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Kim(berley) (Elizabeth) Caraher, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thomson Gale. The length of the entry is 471 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Customer Reviews (1)

True to the Show!
I loved the Colorful Pictures inside and I really loved the Cover of the Book where Kim is Climing up the ladder to Drakken's Helicoptor and Shego is trying to stop her with that Green goop,but Shego is Not going to succeed,Ron is trying to hold on to dear life to that ladder and he's scared or Worried as usual and Rufus is clinging on to him. ... Read more

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Discover the roots of international transracial adoption

International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice explores the long history of international transracial adoption. Scholars present the expert multidisciplinary perspectives and up-to-date research on this most significant and longstanding form of international child welfare practice. Viewpoints and research are discussed from the academic disciplines of psychology, ethnic studies, sociology, social work, and anthropology. The chapters examine sociohistorical background, the forming of new families, reflections on Korean adoption, birth country perspectives, global perspectives, implications for practice, and archival, historical, and current resources on Korean adoption.

International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice provides fresh insight into the origins, development, and institutionalization of Korean adoption. Through original research and personal accounts, this revealing text explores how Korean adoptees and their families fit into their family roles--and offers clear perspectives on adoption as child welfare practice. Global implications and politics, as well as the very personal experiences are examined in detail. This source is a one-of-a-kind look into the full spectrum of information pertaining to Korean adoption.

Topics in International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice include:

adoption from the Korean perspective
historical origins of Korean adoption in the United States
adjustments of young adult adoptees
marketing to choosy adopters
ethnic identity
perspectives on the importance of race and culture in parenting
birth mothers' perspectives
sociological approach to race and identity
representations of adoptees in Korean popular culture
adoption in Australia and the Netherlands
much, much more

International Korean Adoption: A Fifty-Year History of Policy and Practice is illuminating reading for adoptees, adoptive parents, practitioners, educators, students, and any child welfare professional. ... Read more

Product Description
Harrod's Crazy Alice has three sections of rolickingpoems: "Crazy Alice, a fictional autobiography exploring the poet asyour woman; "Sex Without Words," which explores the connectionsbetween language and the body, words and love-making; and "Artifacts,"poems largely from her experience as parent and teacher.Harrod'smost popular book among high school teachers and their students. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Emerging Infectious Diseases, published by U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases on September 1, 2010. The length of the article is 5571 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Determinants of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis clusters, California, USA, 2004-2007.
Author: John Z. Metcalfe
Publication: Emerging Infectious Diseases (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2010
Publisher: U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases
Volume: 16Issue: 9Page: 1403(7)

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more