A tender, humorous account of a couple’s struggle to start a family.
Novelist Hansen (The Monsters of St. Helena, 2002, etc.) chronicles the journey he took with his wife through years of fertility treatments and adoption proceedings.
New advances in reproductive technology have given unprecedented hope to couples with difficulties conceiving a child. These advances can also, as they did in the Hansens’ case, lead to a six-year cycle of daily hormone shots, intrauterine treatments and dwindling financial resources. The author reveals the isolation he and his wife Elizabeth felt, despite relatives’ and friends’ well-meaning efforts to be supportive. Eventually, the couple decided to adopt, which proved to be equally harrowing and expensive. They found themselves selling their qualifications as parents in short classified ads, sizing up the genetic pros and cons of potential adoptees and finally traveling to the ends of the earth—Siberia—on their quest to be parents. There was no shortage of bumps along the road, and Hansen makes palpable the couple’s yearning for the life with children they had envisioned since they got married. Their desire for some approximation of the family they planned on led them to rule out an open adoption in the United States: “Just because we’d been through the IVF wars and lost,” writes Hansen with characteristic wit and self-awareness, “that didn’t mean that Elizabeth should have to resign herself to the role of co-mother.” They went overseas, searching for a child with whom they felt a deep connection. Supplementing their story with lucid explanations of fertility options and procedures, the author has crafted a book that is both a helpful guide for infertile couples and a personal memoir appealing to any empathetic reader. The title tips its hat to Joseph, adoptive father of Jesus, and the much-covered subject of infertility does indeed benefit from the addition of a male perspective.
A tender, humorous account of a couple’s struggle to start a family.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59486-827-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Modern Times/Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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