An unflinching look at the consequences and rewards of open adoption, written with care and precision.
If giving up a child for adoption leaves a void in the mother’s life, what happens when she remains an active part of the child’s life afterward? That void must be carried with her.
When landscape architect Seek became pregnant at age 22, she and her boyfriend opted for an “open” adoption, an arrangement in which the biological and adoptive families maintain some degree of contact. Finding a suitable couple presented numerous challenges, but giving Jonathan to his new parents while remaining part of the family mosaic proved much harder. A counselor warned the author that the “window of open adoption would open both ways.” Just as she would see any difficulties the adoptive parents faced, her own pain and ambivalence would no longer be private. Seek writes in a style that feels intimate one moment, sterile the next, and she sharply renders her feelings for her son; giving birth, “I felt that my soul had stepped out and sat beside me.” The author marveled at the insignificance of her architecture major compared to the thrill of “building” a human being. Yet descriptions of the birth father, Jevn, are hard to decipher. Seek broke off the relationship and insisted on adoption, but her frustration with Jevn comes to the fore often, despite (or because of?) some lingering fondness. Numerous moves for school and work overlapped with visits to Jonathan and his growing family; the author drives home the point that even as life moves on, it’s a life cleft in two. What might have been was reduced to catching up on the latest developmental milestone, comparing her son with his siblings, and waiting for him to pose the inevitable question: why? She ultimately takes heart seeing her son thrive in a happy home, recognizing that she could not have offered the same stability.
An unflinching look at the consequences and rewards of open adoption, written with care and precision.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-16445-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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