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John Colapinto

Author of As Nature Made Him

5+ Works 1,737 Members 53 Reviews

About the Author

John Colapinto is an award-winning longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller As Nature Made Him and the novel About the Author. He lives in New York City.

Works by John Colapinto

As Nature Made Him (2000) 1,231 copies
About the Author (2001) 392 copies
This Is the Voice (2021) 75 copies
Undone: A Novel (2015) 26 copies
Becoming a Neurosurgeon (2019) 13 copies

Associated Works

The Best American Science Writing 2011 (2011) — Contributor — 86 copies
Reader's Digest Today's Best Nonfiction 60 — Contributor — 1 copy

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Common Knowledge

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Reviews

interesting, more of a light history of theories about speech than anything else. a little bit about evolution, interesting bit about a tribe with a unique sung language and the bits about how language is effected by gender , race and class and all that goes with that were also informative
 
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cspiwak | 2 other reviews | Mar 6, 2024 |
Fabulous book about the human voice. So important, but not studied or written about enough. Very well written. I thought the last couple or three chapters lagged a bit, but the first two-thirds of the book was packed full of interesting stuff.
 
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steve02476 | 2 other reviews | Jan 3, 2023 |
I have always been a great fan of meta-fiction, especially if there is a strong crime-based plot wound into it. I don’t know why novels about writing novels should be so appealing, but they always are.

This is a particularly fine example, and one that reminded me of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz which I picked up by chance fairly recently and thoroughly enjoyed. In that, without giving away too much of an intricate plot, a writer who has one successful book under his belt but has struggled to follow it with anything of consequence ends up delivering creative writing classes at a university summer school. One summer he encounters a particularly unpleasant student who boasts about having developed a marvellous plot that he is simply biding his time to write. On a drunken evening he describes the plot to the teacher who, basically, steals it.

In this book there is a slightly different twist in that Cal Cunningham, the protagonist, has his heart set upon being a writer but can’t overcome his procrastinatory nature sufficiently actually to sit down and write. In the meantime, he is living high on the hog in New York, and recounting his exploits to his rather tame and unassuming flatmate. Little does he realise that his flatmate is himself writing reams of text, in which he commits excerpts from Cal’s life to paper in what becomes an amazing novel. Cal discovers this by chance, on the same day that the flatmate dies.

Feeling that this was really his story anyway, Cal decides to steal the story, retyping it and passing it off as his own. It is published to stratospheric critical acclaim and secures immense commercial success, with the film rights being bought for a huge sum. This success does not bring the undiluted joy for which Cal had hoped. He is still unable to bring himself to start another book, and as his wealth and comfort accrue, he feels increasingly vulnerable to exposure. He feels he has done everything to cover his tracks, but he is wrong.

Colapinto handles the material excellently. I was sucked into the story right from the start, and bought into it entirely. Cal is a well-drawn character. Although he is a fraud and a rampant opportunist, the reader feels his frustration and outrage as various risks arise.
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1 vote
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Eyejaybee | 16 other reviews | Mar 24, 2022 |
this is actually quite interesting. i had kind of expected this to be an early story of a transgender man (this first was published in 1999) but that's not at all what it was. it was the story of a boy baby whose penis was traumatically injured (mostly lost) during a catastrophic circumcision operation at 8 months old, and so was castrated and raised as a girl. it was the late 60's and was established medical practice until the mid 90's to reassign gender to medical cases like these (which are far more common than you might think) and to intersex infants.

this was both the story of david's life, his childhood where everyone tried to force him to be a girl, and of the medical side of this story. of the perfect experiment because david was an identical twin, and his brother was not put through the operation, botched or otherwise. of this doctor that was so driven to prove that hormones don't matter in gender determination, that he was unable to accept any data (or any people) who didn't fit his scientific theory. this doctor was the father of sex and gender study and could have done so much for the field, and instead has a legacy of trauma and surgical intervention that ruined so many lives.

both david's story and the medical story are interesting. because the book tries to cover them both, though, neither are fully addressed in a way that is entirely satisfying for the reader. we don't really hear what it's like for david or his family. we see that his mom is depressed, that his dad is an alcoholic, that his twin brother was in trouble with the law and in school, that both kids were put through psychological abuse (and worse) at the hands of the doctors. but we don't hear what they were going through. what it was like to make the decision to reassign their baby's gender. to see him grow up, as a girl, and obviously unhappy in that role. to come to question their decision and their role in their child's unhappiness.

there are many holes, and lots of unanswered questions, because the author is trying to do so much. and he does it well, although there is a strange commitment to using female pronouns and a female name for the period of life that david lived as a girl, so a sentence could read: "david remembers an incident when she was seven." it felt a little disrespectful, although i know he wasn't trying to be. anyway, this is definitely interesting, and a terrible story of what the medical profession perpetuated on so many children for so long.
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½
1 vote
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overlycriticalelisa | 32 other reviews | Feb 14, 2022 |

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