A book that makes the topic of hunger entirely satisfying.
Hunger takes on new meaning in O’Brien’s memoir about love, longing, and an ever growling stomach.
Many people have written about eating disorders, but a parent-inflicted eating regime is less-trod territory. In her debut memoir, the author tackles the uncomfortable truth of her mother’s obsession with healthy food. Year’s before paleo, detox, and Atkins would become common terms, O’Brien’s mother was on a mission to heal her body through her diet. But eating healthy wasn’t enough. The author’s mother forced “The Program” on her four children and TV-executive husband as well. That meant “blended salads,” juices, steamed vegetables, and rice three meals per day, with no meat and no cheating. “Drink your blended salad before it oxidizes,” O’Brien’s mother would encourage her children. Of course, all of this was also served with a heaping side of guilt, and the residual self-reproach left a bad taste in the author’s mouth for years. It wasn’t until college that O’Brien allowed herself a few crumbs of a brownie. “The brownies are gone and I’m suddenly left with the consequences of what I’ve done,” she writes. “What was I thinking? White flour and egg whites take B vitamins from the body. Chocolate never leaves our system. I feel seared with sadness….I can no longer consider myself pure.” But bad habits die hard, and even after allowing meat and sugar into her diet, O’Brien struggled with eating shame. Not surprisingly, the aftermath of a childhood deprived of sweets and meats also took its toll on her siblings, although each coped and recovered in his or her own way. Ultimately, this story isn’t just about food; it’s about the mother-daughter bond and how the desire to please one’s parents may never go away. O’Brien ably articulates this challenging relationship all children and parents struggle with, be it through food, favoritism, or failure to love.
A book that makes the topic of hunger entirely satisfying.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12883-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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