Useful, well-informed encouragement for new and prospective parents.
How parenting affects body and mind.
Conaboy, a journalist specializing in health issues, makes an engaging book debut with an informative, well-researched look at the physical and psychological changes caused by engaging in “the life-supporting practice of mothering.” Drawing on interviews with parents, scientists, and medical practitioners; examining abundant research; and reflecting on her own experiences as the mother of two sons, the author depicts motherhood as “a distinct developmental stage with long-lasting effects, in which each of the body’s systems thought to regulate social behavior, emotion, and immune responses” are dramatically affected. Noting the dearth of scientific studies about parents who are not “straight, cisgender people who share DNA with their child,” Conaboy focuses largely on birth mothers while also reporting on the experiences of fathers and other relatives involved in caregiving. In a historical and cultural overview of assumptions about motherhood, she underscores the social, political, and religious forces that gave rise to “the fallacy of the maternal instinct,” which has left some women feeling inadequate and guilty. She roundly debunks this notion, taken as scientific fact by lawmakers who want to limit reproductive rights and maternity benefits by arguing that motherhood is women’s destiny and that mothers are innately constituted as caregivers. Conaboy shares research in neurobiology and endocrinology that has revealed complex ways that pregnancy, birth, and caregiving reorganize the brain, “altering the neural feedback loops that dictate how we react to the world around us, how we read and respond to other people, and how we regulate our own emotions.” These changes occur, in varying degrees, in both men and women. The author deftly translates scientific studies—by neurobiologists, anthropologists, primatologists, psychologists, and endocrinologists, among others—into accessible prose that speaks to needs and anxieties that many parents share. Adapting to motherhood, she asserts, is “a bodily challenge and a logistical challenge” that lasts a lifetime.
Useful, well-informed encouragement for new and prospective parents.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-76228-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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