Special Topics in Being a Human
A Queer and Tender Guide to Things I've Learned the Hard Way about Caring for People, Including Myself
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
As an author, educator, and public speaker, S. Bear Bergman has documented his experience as, among other things, a trans parent, with wit and aplomb. He also writes the advice column “Ask Bear,” in which he answers crucial questions about how best to make our collective way through the world.
Featuring disarming illustrations by Saul Freedman-Lawson, Special Topics in Being a Human elaborates on “Ask Bear”’s premise: a gentle, witty, and insightful book of practical advice for the modern age. It offers Dad advice and Jewish bubbe wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens, to help you navigate some of the complexities of life—from how to make big decisions or make a good apology, to how to get someone’s new name and pronouns right as quickly as possible, to how to gracefully navigate a breakup. With warmth and candor, Special Topics in Being a Human calls out social inequities and injustices in traditional advice-giving, validates your feelings, asks a lot of questions, and tries to help you be your best possible self with kindness, compassion, and humor.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This delightful, neatly intersectional graphic compendium of advice tailored to a variety of situations—such as "How to Apologize (Properly, Not Like a Republican Congressman)"—lands as so down-to-earth that few readers will mind that it's telling them what to do. Bergman (Blood, Marriage, Wine and Glitter), of the web advice column "Asking Bear," approaches his mission with humility, humor, and practicality. Each section contains numbered steps, considerations of context, and illustrations showcasing a refreshing range of human bodies. The artwork by Freedman-Lawson includes some examples drawn from the co-creators' real lives, such as in "How to Have a Disagreement, or Even an Argument, Without Having a Fight," where Bergman advises that so much of marital dispute heats up from delivery versus the facts of debate—so in his marriage, they randomized which of the couple has to apologize about using a "tone" based on whether it's an even or odd day. In an especially charming section titled "How to Be Bad at Things but Do Them Anyway," Bergman does a stint as illustrator, with wobbly stick figures, while Freedman-Lawson writes "Unease... is likelier to be an indication that we need more practice than it is a harbinger of doom." Delivered with more than a spoonful of kindness, this medicine goes down easy and has the potential to facilitate real healing. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated the co-creators of this book are married.
