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
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
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
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