A revelatory look into Lamaze writ large—the man and the arduous process that gave birth to his pain-reducing approach....
An unexpectedly engrossing portrait of Fernand Lamaze and the road he took to make universal his method of painless childbirth, fashioned in novelistic style by his granddaughter Gutmann.
Working from interviews, family documents, letters, diaries, and notebooks, Gutmann has drawn an intriguing picture of Lamaze, starting with his move from Nancy to Paris as a young medical student and following him through the absinthe-and-brothel nights that preceded his years in the army, his service in WWII, and his return to Paris and subsequent marriage to Louise. Penury forced Lamaze to abandon the study of neurology and take up obstetrics. Although he became a notorious philanderer, his heart was clearly in the right place as far as his work was concerned, and he financed his treatment of poor and working-class women through the success of his growing practice among the city’s wealthy. Gutmann is plainly fascinated by Lamaze’s extramarital activities—at one point the good doctor had a several mistresses living in his apartment building (and dining at his table) at the same time, because he preferred to be honest about the whole situation—but Lamaze’s conviction that the pain of childbirth could be all but eliminated without chemical intervention is the story’s focus. Hints came to Lamaze when he learned that women in Hawaii actually gave birth with a smile on their lips; he also discovered that in the Soviet Union a painless-birthing technique was being developed that took its cues from the research into reflexive conditioning of Pavlov and Velvoski. Petty rivalries in the medical profession slowed him, as did the Cold War—but Lamaze’s greatest obstacle was the deeply held belief that suffering had to attend childbirth: So inoculated for generations, women inevitably created a uterine contraction that was painful. Gutmann also makes it clear that the Lamaze method is not an easy six-step technique, but a pregnancy-long humanistic process involving the doctor, midwife, and partner—and that insurance companies are not prepared to pay for.
A revelatory look into Lamaze writ large—the man and the arduous process that gave birth to his pain-reducing approach. (8-page b&w photo insert)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26190-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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