Gender benders

Before Christine Jorgensen shocked the world in the 1950s by undergoing a male-to-female sex change, Laura Dillon went the other way. Dillon, a British medical student, is the first person on record to make the switch from female to male via surgery.

In "The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution," Somerville author Pagan Kennedy offers an absorbing biography. Dillon started taking testosterone in 1938, at age 23, and underwent a series of surgeries in the 1940s. Interestingly, it was advances in surgery for men injured in World War I that made sex-change operations medically possible.

Michael Dillon, the man-made man, hoped to marry Roberta Cowell, a post-operative male-to-female, but she rebuffed him. Dillon became a Tibetan Buddhist and died in desperate fear that his past would be uncovered by the tabloid press.

Kennedy appears at 7 p.m. tomorrow at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Cambridge; at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline; and at 7:30 p.m. on March 27 at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newton.

With the baseball season approaching and the first Red Sox home game on April 10 , talk of the team's prospects has shifted into high gear. Among the most authoritative opinions are those of Christina Kahrl and Steven Goldman, editors of "Baseball Prospectus 2007." They will swing by Barnes & Noble at BU at 7 p.m. Wednesday .

Tucked into an old building a stone's throw from the State House is a one-room library inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. The Yvonne Pappenheim Library on Racism owns 2,600 books, whose topics range from slavery and the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary anti-racism efforts, as well as children's books, videotapes, and DVDs.

The library, at 14 Beacon St., is operated by Community Change, founded in 1968 shortly after King's assassination. Community Change invites other nonprofits to meet in its library. Such meetings often end with a book catching someone's interest, as happened with Cara Powers. The book that intrigued her was "Are Italians White? : How Race Is Made in America," edited by Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno . It discusses discrimination against people from southern Italy, who sometimes have dark skin and ancestors from Africa. "This book was like a revelation to me," said Powers, whose forebears are from southern Italy. "I don't know that I would find it elsewhere." A one-time $5 registration fee is required to borrow items. The catalog is at communitychangeinc.org .

"A Miracle of Catfish," by Larry Brown (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

"The Last Empress," by Anchee Min (Houghton Mifflin)

"The Rose Café: Love and War in Corsica," by John Hanson Mitchell (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Suzanne Strempek Shea, author and bookseller at Edwards Books in Springfield, recommends Baron Wormser's "The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living off the Grid" (University Press of New England): "This honest, crisp and lovely series of essays is laden with the lifestyle's often unexpected riches, rather than what it denied."

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.