Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.
Unabashedly emotional, at times cloyingly cute memoir of how Chinese-American actor Wong and his partner became parents.
Composed mostly of e-mail the author sent and received, the narrative also includes baby Jackson’s imagined recollections (more mawkish than moving) of his birth and early days. Beginning with the premature arrival of Jackson and his short-lived twin, Boaz, Wong describes the first anxious hours and the roller-coaster days that followed as Boaz died and Jackson struggled to survive. In addition to a nail-biting account of the ordeal that ended when he was finally able to take Jackson home, the author also provides a tribute to his Chinese-American family in San Francisco and an account of an increasingly common but still controversial form of parenthood. In the late 1990s, Wong and long-time partner Richie, deciding that they wanted a child who would share their Chinese and Jewish heritages, began researching the options. Through a California agency they found a surrogate mother, Shauna, who already had two children. Richie’s sister, also already a mother, was prepared to donate eggs, while Wong would provide the sperm for in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were successfully implanted, but Shauna went into early labor, and the babies were born in May instead of August. Boaz, fatally anemic, died within hours. Jackson survived, but his lungs were immature and his colon blocked; he had to be flown by chartered plane to another hospital for more specialized care. As Wong relates his emotions, his worries, and the struggles to fulfill his professional obligations on both coasts, he also lovingly details his family’s support. The e-mails from sympathizers, friends, family, and colleagues, however personally affecting and helpful they were, pad the text rather than inform it.
Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052953-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
