A debut memoir recounting how a San Francisco–based couple became parents with the help of a surrogate mother in India.
By age 36, marketing and communications executive Arieff had suffered three painful miscarriages, one of them in the middle of her second trimester. The discovery of large uterine fibroids portended that a successful, full-term pregnancy would be almost impossible. She and her lawyer husband, Alex, looked into surrogacy options, and their research led them to the Akanksha Infertility Clinic in India. Initially Arieff made the trip there solo to undergo several weeks of IVF treatments. Two weeks later, Alex joined her and Arieff's eggs were harvested, fertilized and implanted into the couple's hired surrogate mother, Vaina. A young married mother from a rural village, Vaina spent the next nine months living at the clinic, under a doctor's care and free from the judgments of her neighbors. She planned to use the money, equal to 15 years of salaried work, to buy her husband a taxi and pay for her children's schooling. Writing in the present tense, Arieff chronicles all of the minutiae involved in their choice, including their fears, deep gratitude for and connection to Vaina for birthing their two twin girls (“no matter how far apart we are geographically, Vaina, my daughters, and I will always be connected by this sacred thread”), and the reactions of their friends and family. The author provides a smooth, compelling read that will surely interest prospective parents exploring their options for surrogacy abroad. A personal, optimistic take on a controversial subject.
Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-71668-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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