A remarkable exploration of pregnancy.
The diary of Maso’s (Defiance, 1998, etc.) pregnancy.
In her 40s, Maso decides to have a baby. Her record of pregnancy begins with the observation that everything “is enlarged” by it—her hunger, her breasts, and her emotions. She is terrified that she will lose the baby. At a farm, she lifts heavy pumpkins and is ambivalent about her every gesture: will schlepping squash trigger a miscarriage? But should she become an invalid for nine months? Maso mentally compares the possibly-knocked-up 15-year-old who checks her panties for menstrual blood every 20 minutes, hoping for a sign of her period, with the definitely-pregnant-but-might-miscarry 40-year-old who makes the same inspection with far different hopes. After the first trimester is over, Maso relaxes a bit. She envisions sending nutrients to her daughter through her placenta (“Placenta is the Latin word for cake, which is pretty great”). She loves her swelled shape—more “like a beached whale than a person.” She plays happily with her nieces and nephews, who are amazed that she can have a baby without being married, and she has a spiritual awakening: “The Lord is with thee. . . . Never have I understood these words as I understand them now.” But in the eighth month, things begin to go wrong: the baby stops moving, and Maso’s doctor induces labor, not sure little Rose will make it. But Rose is born. Maso gives us only a glimpse of life with Rose: she resents La Leche’s insistence that she breastfeed her child, and her relationship with her partner is predictably strained by the introduction of a newborn. But these are minor complications in the face of what she has gained: a new life.
A remarkable exploration of pregnancy.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58243-088-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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