Shields’s forthright admission of feelings that many similarly afflicted new mothers deny could well spark valuable...
Unsparing account of the actress’s experience with acute postpartum anxiety disorder following the birth of her daughter in 2003.
Shields also shares details about the pressures and frustrations of her struggle to get pregnant, her joy at finally conceiving, her uneventful pregnancy and the long labor that ended with a C-section. But the central story begins in the operating room, where the sight of her husband holding newborn Rowan filled her with “jealousy, fear, and rage.” Recovering in the hospital, she assumed that her feelings of misery and alienation would change, but when her baby was brought to her to nurse, she felt no bond with the infant, whom she regarded as “a complete stranger.” At home, physical exhaustion was accompanied by panic, dread and enormous sadness. Shields pulls no punches in describing her profound detachment from her child. She had no desire to pick up or care for Rowan, she admits; what she wanted was to run away. In the weeks following the birth, it became clear that Shields was suffering from a condition much more serious than “the baby blues.” The antidepressant Paxil helped some, but her decision to go off it cold turkey was a serious mistake. Trying to reconcile motherhood and an acting career added to the pressure. (Shields’s awareness of herself as a celebrity gives this memoir special interest.) She finally pulled out of her unnervingly severe postpartum depression with the help of psychotherapy in combination with other antidepressants. Educating herself about the condition and reading about other women’s experiences also helped, as did the simple passage of time. In addition to her personal story, the author has included solid information about postpartum depression; an afterword lists helpful books, Web sites and hot lines.
Shields’s forthright admission of feelings that many similarly afflicted new mothers deny could well spark valuable discussions about “this large white elephant sitting in the room that no one was supposed to talk about.”Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0189-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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