Skillfully outlines how to prepare for and raise a child out of wedlock.
A complete guide to having a baby without being married.
Jim and Jessica Braz begin their book with some eye-opening numbers: nearly 40% of all births in America take place with unmarried parents—1,500,000 children are born out of wedlock every day. Those parents will have lots of questions, and the authors answer many of them here. Some topics will be familiar to parents reviewing information on childbirth: miscarriages, C-sections, vaccinations, and sudden infant death syndrome. But given the book’s emphasis on co-parenting that happens without the benefit (social and legal) of a marriage contract, much of their book deals with varying concepts of cooperation, ways for two people who are not technically bound to each other to work together for the sake of their child. The authors have been through this personally (they are married now, but each has had a child out of wedlock) and know the intricacies of, for instance, dealing with lawyers, warning their readers, “some attorneys are more interested in increasing their billable hours than doing what’s best for you.” If the need arises, it’s the lawyers who’ll establish the limits of sole physical custody, joint physical custody, and the complications of legal custody in all its forms. Those and other concerns—everything from prenatal care to school issues—arise from all aspects of having a child out of wedlock, and the authors tackle all of those complications with warmth, sympathy, and a very approachable style. They suggest a variety of ways to avoid escalating arguments—and are also very clear about what to do when the situation can’t be saved, if, for instance, the mother isn’t taking care of her health during pregnancy: “If you are begging and pleading for your unborn child’s well-being and Mom still won’t listen to reason,” they write, “then at that point, we think you would need to consult your lawyer.” Readers dealing with these kinds of issues will find this book invaluable, particularly with regard to negotiation.
Skillfully outlines how to prepare for and raise a child out of wedlock.Pub Date: May 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-681680-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: BOOW
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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