An edgy appreciation of the way children take over your life, your space, and your heart, no matter your age.
Ladies’ Home Journal columnist Newman shares all in her debut memoir, a chronicle of the heart-stopping perils and fierce joys of motherhood in the fifth decade.
Nearing the end of her 30s, living in New York and married to John, a retired British opera singer in his mid-60s, the author felt it was time for motherhood. After several miscarriages and failed fertility treatments, she tried in vitro fertilization and soon found herself pregnant. At 40, she gave birth prematurely to twins Henry and Augustus, who at first remained in the neonatal unit while Newman returned to her one-bedroom apartment. Builders were in the process of linking that apartment to the one above it she’d recently bought, but of course the babies came home before the work was done. Her living room became the nursery, and her husband spent more and more time uptown in his own apartment, leaving Newman to cope alone. John’s initial hands-off attitude to his sons—he claimed the children made him feel trapped—made the first 18 months Newman describes even more fraught. As she addresses the tensions in her marriage, she also notes the other sea-changes in her life: no sleep, no regular schedule, and constant worrying about money, the twins (Augustus is underweight and shows some developmental lags), and her relationship with their excellent but critical nanny. New York caregivers, she learns, are as competitive about their charges as the mothers: “to the nannies of Manhattan, their child cannot have too much; it’s the other children who are spoiled.” Though determined not to use TV as a sitter, the author happily admits to relishing the peace provided by baby videos and Teletubbies.
An edgy appreciation of the way children take over your life, your space, and your heart, no matter your age.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4013-5189-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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