Useful, well-informed encouragement for new and prospective parents.
How parenting affects body and mind.
Conaboy, a journalist specializing in health issues, makes an engaging book debut with an informative, well-researched look at the physical and psychological changes caused by engaging in “the life-supporting practice of mothering.” Drawing on interviews with parents, scientists, and medical practitioners; examining abundant research; and reflecting on her own experiences as the mother of two sons, the author depicts motherhood as “a distinct developmental stage with long-lasting effects, in which each of the body’s systems thought to regulate social behavior, emotion, and immune responses” are dramatically affected. Noting the dearth of scientific studies about parents who are not “straight, cisgender people who share DNA with their child,” Conaboy focuses largely on birth mothers while also reporting on the experiences of fathers and other relatives involved in caregiving. In a historical and cultural overview of assumptions about motherhood, she underscores the social, political, and religious forces that gave rise to “the fallacy of the maternal instinct,” which has left some women feeling inadequate and guilty. She roundly debunks this notion, taken as scientific fact by lawmakers who want to limit reproductive rights and maternity benefits by arguing that motherhood is women’s destiny and that mothers are innately constituted as caregivers. Conaboy shares research in neurobiology and endocrinology that has revealed complex ways that pregnancy, birth, and caregiving reorganize the brain, “altering the neural feedback loops that dictate how we react to the world around us, how we read and respond to other people, and how we regulate our own emotions.” These changes occur, in varying degrees, in both men and women. The author deftly translates scientific studies—by neurobiologists, anthropologists, primatologists, psychologists, and endocrinologists, among others—into accessible prose that speaks to needs and anxieties that many parents share. Adapting to motherhood, she asserts, is “a bodily challenge and a logistical challenge” that lasts a lifetime.
Useful, well-informed encouragement for new and prospective parents.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-76228-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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