A well-researched, informative, and positive account of a very long journey to motherhood.
A chronicle of the great lengths one woman went through to conceive and birth two children.
Denver-based lawyer Katkin was sure she wanted children. Like many women, she assumed it was much harder to avoid pregnancy than to become pregnant. However, after her first miscarriage, she began to realize that becoming a mother wasn’t as easy as she originally thought—but she wasn’t going to give up. As the years progressed—years filled with more miscarriages, hormone injections, in vitro fertilizations, and so many doctors’ appointments that she lost track—her determination to have children only grew stronger. In her debut memoir, the author shares the various methods she and her husband used to finally have two healthy children in their lives. She thoroughly examines the medical side of her treatments, giving readers an in-depth accounting of hormone shots, the way the female body functions pre/during/and post pregnancy, the role a healthy uterus plays in keeping an embryo viable, and the effectiveness of acupuncture and Chinese medicine alongside IVF. Katkin discusses the inadequacies found in the United States when it comes to helping women deal with infertility issues and how patients become consumers, “shopping” for the best clinic when there are few standards, lax regulations, and almost no data on success rates to help patients make informed decisions. She shows how other countries around the world have far better information and rates of success than the U.S., which will lead some readers to question if they should look outside the U.S. for help with similar matters. Katkin also incorporates the stories of other couples, giving a wide-angle look at the pros and cons of medical intervention, the use of surrogate mothers, and the extreme measures many will go to in order to have a baby.
A well-researched, informative, and positive account of a very long journey to motherhood.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4236-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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