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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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