A winning and witty take on a well-covered topic.
A dryly humorous memoir/guidebook about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood by the Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist.
Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2011, etc.) was married to her husband for nearly 20 years before they decided to have children. Having always assumed, vaguely, that she would be a mother, she first wanted to focus on her writing career. Divided into several-dozen short chapters, the book offers dispatches from the frontlines of first-time parenthood. Enright gracefully moves between straight facts, disarmingly funny admissions, her own unexpected revelations and experiences and conversational second-person directives. In "Babies: A Breeder's Guide," the author organizes the narrative into categories that include “Home Birth,” “Naming,” “Burps, Burp!, Burp!,” “Evolution” and “How to Panic,” to name a few. Throughout, Enright displays a great sense of humor, calling to mind two similarly themed memoirs: Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions (1993) and Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work (2002). Enright's conclusions are far more optimistic than Cusk's, but she shares Lamott's talent for drawing the reader fully into her writing with her frank and comic tone. She's equally honest about the difficult, boring aspects of becoming a parent, although Enright's humor works better than her seriousness. While she doesn't shy away from revealing in vibrant detail the traumas and upheavals involved in pregnancy and parenthood, it's her talent for elevating otherwise menial complaints into universal truths that makes the book compelling. Fans of Enright's novels and short stories, especially parents or those contemplating parenthood, will be interested in her perspective.
A winning and witty take on a well-covered topic.Pub Date: April 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07828-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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