An uneven melding of memoir and passionate argument.
A debut memoir of motherhood that also offers a full-throated defense of abortion rights.
In 1981, Abrams was a volunteer pregnancy-options counselor. Two years later, she became a social worker in Philadelphia, working with families of abused and neglected children. Eventually, she moved to a suburb of Washington, D.C., and worked for Maryland’s Child Protective Services. Her work experiences made her see the consequences of bringing unwanted children into the world; at one point, for instance, she poignantly writes of meeting a poverty-stricken mother with five small children. In 1989, when she married Tom, a computer programmer, the two decided to take some time before having children. Later, however, starting a family proved difficult, and after a miscarriage, Abrams discovered that she would need fertility treatments in order to conceive. It wasn’t easy, but she eventually gave birth to a son in 1993, when she was 41. Conceiving a second child was even more difficult, so in 1997, Abrams and her husband adopted a Russian daughter. This book not only tells the story of a devoted mother, but is also about Abrams’ fervent desire for her children—and future generations—to have unfettered reproductive choices, including access to abortion. Abrams’ examples to back up her argument, however, are mostly anecdotal; she points to the fictional 1987 film Dirty Dancing as an example of the oppression of 1960s women, for example, and makes the assertion that abortions performed with dirty knitting needles, prior to Roe v. Wade, were numerous, without citing statistics. Some readers may find her tone a bit cold at times, as when she compares multiple abortions to multiple skiing injuries. However, Abrams’ prose style is smooth throughout. She does have a tendency to jump from topic to topic, though; for example, in the space of just a few pages, she discusses breastfeeding her son, getting over her snobbery about shopping at Kmart, contra dancing, and a disappointing babysitting co-op.
An uneven melding of memoir and passionate argument.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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