A candid, valuable look at infertility.
An exceedingly honest examination of the reality of infertility and the emotionally traumatic experiences involved.
In what is said and left unsaid in Hopewell’s memoir, a clear picture emerges of the emotional effects that infertility has on a couple trying to conceive, as well as how it affects their lives in ways they hadn’t imagined. From descriptions of treatments and procedures to an insightful look at the community within the world of in vitro fertilization patients, a reader looking to learn about IVF or the process of using a donor egg will find many answers here. Hopewell takes the reader through the ordeal chronologically with chapter titles that humorously depict the stages of a harrowing experience. Her honesty illuminates the stark reality of infertility and the many unappealing procedures required to verify it, as well as unglamorous other means to become pregnant, if the woman so chooses. Parallel to the medical aspects is Hopewell’s personal experience: the upsetting conversations with her children about the specifics of adding a new family member and the difficulties she faced in making the decision to use a donor egg. The emotional implications of any pregnancy can be far-reaching—the ostensibly joyous occasion can be colored by any number of complications, as Hopewell frankly describes. Well-written and thoughtful, Hopewell’s memoir sheds a sometimes unflattering light on her life en route to an unconventional pregnancy; her bluntness is to be commended because it may be just what some women in similar circumstances need. Readers will gain a new understanding of how infertility affects one’s family, social circle, career and self-perception.
A candid, valuable look at infertility.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1936940110
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Epigraph
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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