Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing.
Orenstein (Schoolgirls, 1994, etc.) chronicles her tortuous journey to motherhood.
The author was 35, involved in a busy, successful career as a journalist and ambivalent about having a child, when her filmmaker husband broached the subject. A diagnosis of breast cancer six weeks later put the baby plans on hold, and Orenstein was 36 before she began trying in earnest to get pregnant. Her witty presentation of such nitty-gritty details as temperature charts, cervical-mucous consistency, sperm counts and timed intercourse at first make her memoir an amusing read. The mood shifts, however, with a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, followed by another and then a third. One of the book’s most moving chapters, which appeared in slightly different form in the New York Times Magazine, recounts the author’s visit to a Buddhist temple in Tokyo; red-capped statues of infants lined the temple’s shady path, offering ritual acknowledgement of the loss felt by women who miscarry a fetus (a taboo subject in the West). Orenstein’s obsession with becoming pregnant increasingly placed a strain on her marriage. It eventually led her to spend thousands of dollars for in-vitro fertilization at clinics whose staff acted more like salesmen than doctors and treated her more like a customer than a patient. She tried acupuncture, another less-than-happy experience, and implantation of a donor egg, which failed. She and her Japanese-American husband finally decided to adopt a Japanese baby boy. That red-tape-snarled transaction became even more complicated when Orenstein discovered she was again pregnant. Would she end up with two babies, one or none? The answer is in the title.
Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-017-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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