An authentic look at the inability to conceive a child and an alternative route to pregnancy.
An honest memoir about infertility and parenting, written with the assistance of veteran co-author Adamson.
At 34, former actress Röhm (Nerissa, 2010) "lusted" to have a child. But this "baby lust," she writes, "didn't come out of nowhere. It arose out of a long and complex history of lusts woven together into a story that became my own.” She had a successful acting career and a steady boyfriend, and it seemed logical to finally heed the demands of her body and begin the baby-making process. Unfortunately, her body had made adjustments of its own and had aged prematurely: "My eggs, at thirty-four, looked more like the eggs of someone who was forty-four." Swallowing her pride and shame, Röhm embarked on the stress-filled and expensive road of in vitro fertilization. She and her partner were lucky, producing a child on the first try. With motherhood came a new awareness of her own childhood and the difficulties her mother had endured to raise her as a single parent. The author gained a new love of life, a sense of spirituality and a drive to tell her story of IVF so that other women would not feel the whirlwind of emotions that she felt before her pregnancy. Röhm openly tells her story of her fertility issues. Thanks to modern science, there are ways to combat aging, but the author encourages women to listen to their bodies; there really is a biological clock ticking inside that does slow and stop. Waiting for the "opportune" time to have a child might not be the most prudent decision.
An authentic look at the inability to conceive a child and an alternative route to pregnancy.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1663-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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