A fresh, lively narrative of personal and historical memory.
An exploration of mothering, a capacious, complex, and creative experience.
Historian and mother of two, Knott (History/Indiana Univ.; Sensibility and the American Revolution, 2009) grounds her illuminating investigation in her own experience of pregnancy, delivery, and infant care. Drawing on a prodigious number of histories and archival sources, she teases out anecdotes and testimony from “slim shards of evidence,” sometimes “a single remark in a published diary, a stray sentence or two in government-sponsored interviews with formerly enslaved men and women, a handful of letters in manuscript, a seventeenth-century church court record.” Evidence is especially slim for enslaved or working-class mothers who were illiterate or those, such as Native Americans, who conveyed their experiences orally, but Knott has managed to include their voices—along with gay and trans parents—as much as possible as she examines assumptions about conception, how and when pregnancy was determined, and responses to miscarriage, such as hers, which left her fearful of infertility. Pregnant again, perceiving her baby’s “inner touch” inspired her search for historical mentions of quickening among 17th-century noblewomen and contemporaneous field slaves on Southern plantations. As her pregnancy progressed, she thought about terms for heavily pregnant women, ranging from “great-bellied” in the 16th and 17th centuries to “sticky-sweet euphemisms” of 19th-century working-class slang: “in the pudding club” or having “a bun in the oven.” After her son was born, Knott faced the “humiliation and excess” of nursing. From the mid-18th century and throughout the 19th, she discovered, “whose breast? remained the central concern about holding and feeding” until “sentimentalism” ushered in “a new way of venerating motherhood in popular culture” and made wet nurses obsolete. Interrupted sleep, caring for a colicky infant, and weighing advice from friends, grandmothers, and child raising manuals all propelled Knott into libraries. She wonders about who wrote and actually read how-to books. “Mothering,” she realizes, “is tangible, sensory, and material”; “it unfolds at first hand. Babies are never pure thought experiments.”
A fresh, lively narrative of personal and historical memory.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-21358-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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