Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man

Winner - Best Transgender Nonfiction - 2015 Lambda Literary Awards

Best Books of 2014 - Publishers Weekly

Best Books of 2014 - NPR Books

Best Nonficton Books of 2014 - Kirkus Reviews

10 Best Transgender Non-Fiction Books - Advocate

"Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive hurtled through my life. I read it in a matter of hours. It’s a confession, it’s a poem, it's a time warp, it’s a brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee—his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated."—Heidi Julavits, author of The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment

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.