No way Renée

Publishers Weekly

Tennis star turned transsexual, Richards retreads much ground from her 1986 autobiography, Second Serve, while opening a window on the consequences of her choices. Born in 1934, Richard Raskind was a Yale tennis star, had a navy stint and became a well-known eye surgeon. Always feeling that he was a woman, Raskind was on and off hormone therapy from the early 1960s, but married in 1969 and fathered a son. Six years later, he underwent sex reassignment surgery and became Renee Richards. What's new are the personal elements of Richards's life since then: her friendship and coaching experience with Martina Navratilova and her evolving, often conflicted relationship with son Nick. Holding Rastafarian beliefs and resenting his father, Nick skipped off to Jamaica at the age of 13 and had to be kidnapped back to the U.S. While the family fights and complications of surgery take place in the context of the author's transsexualism, they are mostly ordinary, as is much of her current life as "an old-fashioned American." More interesting is Richards's discomfort with current radical transgender identities and politics and her searing list of regrets at the end of the book, where she finally opens up emotionally. B&w photos. (Feb.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Richards, born Richard Raskind, picks up her life story some 30 years after her famous sex-change operation. While her first book, Second Serve: The Renee Richards Story, also coauthored with Ames, concentrated on her early life and highlighted her efforts to play professional tennis on the women's tour, this book chronicles her later years and attempts to clear up an earlier misconception that she regretted her decision to change her sex. The first chapter recaps her childhood, including urges to wear her sister's clothes, and then covers her serial episodes of hormone treatments, surgery, and highly publicized but short-lived tennis career. But what happened after the media circus subsided and Dr. Richards—a practicing ophthalmologist—had to determine how she would live the rest of her life? Richards considers her relationships with her friends, her colleagues, and her son in a straightforward manner but still manages to reveal little about the people closest to her or their feelings about what she's done. In one instance, although she recognizes that her decision to undergo the surgery greatly affected her son and her relationship with him, her conclusion that the experience may have inspired him sounds overly optimistic. Recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/15/06.]
—Regina M. Beard

Kirkus Reviews

A fascinating transsexual testimony. Born in 1934, Dick Raskind had a confusing childhood. Papa Raskind wasn't home much, and Dick's mother, a psychiatrist, sometimes dressed him in a slip to make him look cute. From his earliest days, Raskind felt dogged by a "female side" he named Renee. When Renee took over, Raskind "minimize[d]" his penis and shaved his legs. Eventually, Raskind fell in love with, and married, a beautiful woman, and Renee seemed to go into remission. Raskind hoped that she was "gone for good," but she wasn't. Raskind finally split up with his wife and decided to have sex-reassignment surgery. (His arrival at that decision is skipped over in just a few sentences, one of the few unsatisfying spots in an otherwise detailed account.) Now Renee Richards, she takes a charitable view of the conservative era in which he grew up-there was, Richards acknowledges, no room for transsexuals in post-World War II America, but "the straight-laced culture of my time frequently offered a refuge from the craziness in my house." Richard recounts her post-surgery professional and personal struggles and successes. The author wanted a quiet life as Renee, but his accomplishments as a surgeon and tennis coach made that impossible-the press was all over Richards, and she found herself forced into the position of spokeswoman for all things transsexual (or, as Richards refers to it, "transgendered"). She addresses frankly her romantic encounters and, in the moving last chapter, offers a litany of regrets. She says that she's hurt people along the way, and she laments that she is "a facsimile," adding, "I think I'm a pretty good one, but I will never be more than a fax, a woman with a Ychromosome."An honest look at a courageous life.