A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during...
Navigating the ups and downs of being a new mother.
O’Connell and her partner, Dustin, were contemplating marriage, but the idea of having a child was the farthest thing from both their minds. They had careers to advance, books to write, and other things to do with their lives; there was no time for a kid. Then she got pregnant. Like many soon-to-be moms, O’Connell read everything she could find on pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding, but nothing prepared her for the actual events as they unfolded. In this compact narrative, the author begins slowly, telling her backstory and working through the “wow, I’m pregnant” stage of telling her friends and adjusting to her body as it changed over the months. She incorporates humor and honesty, but this part of the story will feel overly familiar to many readers. Then the prose shifts as she recounts the birth itself. Suddenly, the writing becomes more visceral and dynamic, and she shares the very intimate details of what it was like to spend 40 hours in labor. The author’s engaging tone continues with her discussions of the real feelings she had about her body after pregnancy, her trials with breast-feeding, the resentment she felt toward Dustin, who seemed to be a better parent than she was, and the lack of sexual desire she experienced for months after the birth. For current mothers, the author’s story will resonate deeply. For any woman contemplating having a child, O’Connell provides an accurate depiction of what it can feel like to be a new mom, both physically and emotionally. For men who want to know and understand what being a mother is like, this book should prove useful.
A well-written book that provides refreshingly candid insight into the physical and emotional changes that take place during pregnancy and early motherhood, times that are both “traumatic [and] transcendent.”Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39384-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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