What does it really mean to be a man?

In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one—how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ City Lights Publishers 
• September 9, 2014
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 172 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0872866246
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0872866249