Quick doses of wisdom and solidarity for women at all stages of motherhood.
A working mother offers insight on parenting and living a rich life.
For much of her life as a mother, Barish has worked from home as a writer, crafting columns about parenting based on her own experience as well as conversations with other mothers. This slim volume gathers a selection of those pieces written over more than ten years of being a parent to two daughters. In each piece, the author addresses an aspect of motherhood and family life, ranging from whether she should rein in a daughter who lives for the competitive edge to tackling her older daughter’s questions about sex. She also covers the needs of mothers: reconnecting with herself through yoga, claiming time and space for her work as a writer and taking the occasional getaway vacation without the kids. Through these short reflections, the reader follows the author’s daughters as they grow up and as Barish herself grows as a woman and mother. She describes how just as a parent is feeling comfortable and confident about how to relate to the current stage in a child’s life, she is already growing into a new phase–a cycle that continues even after a daughter leaves for college. Throughout the book, Barish discusses her evolving relationships with her daughters, as what they need from their mother changes over the years. In a later essay, the author revisits the “mission statement” for motherhood she wrote when the girls were young and reflects on how it has stood the test of time. As a collection of newspaper columns, this is more a series of brief conversations with a mother who’s been there and who has sought out the experiences of other mothers, than an in-depth examination of maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Barish’s heartfelt, thoughtful style makes her stories ring true.
Quick doses of wisdom and solidarity for women at all stages of motherhood.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9792355-0-4
Page Count: 188
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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