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We have read the stories of those who have "crossed" lines of race and class and culture. But few have written of crossing—completely and entirely—the gender line. Crossing is the story of Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald), once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s and 1960s privilege, and her dramatic and poignant journey to becoming a woman. McCloskey's account of her painstaking efforts to learn to "be a woman" unearth fundamental questions about gender and identity, and hatreds and anxieties, revealing surprising answers.

A classic in its field, this pathbreaking book humanized the scientific rhetoric of economics to reveal its literary soul. Economics needs to admit that it, like other sciences, works with metaphors and stories. Its most mathematical and statistical moments are properly dominated by comparison and narration, that is to say, human persuasion. The book was McCloskey's opening move in the development of a "humanomics," and unification of the sciences and the humanities on the field of ordinary business life.