A truthful picture of what it takes to bring a life into the world, exposing Achilles heels large and small.
Feisty blogger and relapsed Mormon Armstrong takes her no-holds-barred approach to life from screen to page as she dishes on the elation, transformation and despair that mark pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.
The author abandoned her rigid religious upbringing upon hitting adulthood in Los Angeles, where she developed a desire for Interpol, tequila, her husband Jon, cursing and eventually offspring. Pregnancy delivered Armstrong to the folds of Utah and the joy of her mother, here dubbed “The Avon World Sales Leader.” The Utah setting provides comic relief, as the author expatiates on her family’s five minivans and the mortal sin of bottle-feeding. Describing the period after daughter Leta was born, Armstrong occasionally interrupts her account to reprint letters she penned monthly to her budding baby. Tender yet mature in tone, these convey the miracles and catastrophes of motherhood from a perspective that contrasts interestingly with the day-to-day narrative, which reflects Armstrong’s blogger roots. Among the never-ending—and occasionally repetitive—string of incidents for which new parents are rarely prepared, she chronicles a colorful apology to a Starbucks cashier and a crazed hunt for a missing infant sock. Self-admittedly not a poster child for stability, the author chooses to give a leading role to her history with chronic depression rather than sweeping it under the rug. (Only her anatomy gets higher billing than her low spirits.) She’s forthcoming about the strain depression placed on her otherwise solid marriage and the fact that it sometimes impaired her capacity to care for Leta. Armstrong places herself on the chopping block so fellow mothers can follow her without guilt through such common experiences as the debate over pacifier abuse, the horror of hemorrhoids and the agonizing slowness of postpartum recovery.
A truthful picture of what it takes to bring a life into the world, exposing Achilles heels large and small.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-3601-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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