A reassuring picture of one facet of womanhood.
A writer takes a wide-ranging look at life for women who never have children.
Debut author Kaufmann recalls walking on the beach with a new friend and broaching the title question—one she always dreads hearing. With her years of unsuccessful infertility treatment long behind her, the now-single author wouldn’t want people interpreting this as the defining tragedy of her life. Instead, she characterizes childlessness as a situation that, like any other, has advantages as well as drawbacks. Raising a child costs $250,000 and 10 full-time working years, she reports, and “ambitious women still take career hits for having kids.” When she attends the first-ever “NotMom Summit” in Cleveland in 2015, women tell her that having children would have prevented them from experiencing meandering, exciting career paths. Philosophy professor Jane insisted: “Not having children was probably the best thing that ever happened to me…all my energies would have gone into them.” Bobbi felt free to travel while Chris could accept the low paychecks of nonprofit work. “I wish I’d had older non-moms to confide in and seek guidance from,” Kaufmann writes, and this perceptive and informative book is an attempt to fill that gap in the self-help market with stories and tips from those who’ve been there. The author acknowledges that women wind up in this situation for diverse reasons—it’s 50/50 chosen/forced for those she meets—and that the language problem doesn’t help: There’s no good term for a nonmother apart from the medical nulliparous. “Childless" implies a lack; the blithe "childfree" suggests that women are "giddily free." Whichever word one uses, Kaufmann deftly notes that friendships, aging, and spirituality can pose particular challenges for women who don’t have someone to pass their beliefs or possessions to. But she suggests numerous important roles nonmothers can play in children’s lives, such as stepmother, aunt, nanny, or tutor. Ultimately, this supportive volume serves as a plea to respect the diversity of human experience; “our options and lifestyles do not imperil motherhood….Rather, we represent a complementary dynamic,” the author concludes.
A reassuring picture of one facet of womanhood.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-581-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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