A warm portrait of motherhood and the struggles of being a single parent.
From a working single mother, a colorful account of the struggles and triumphs of raising her son while maintaining her sanity.
Shortly into her marriage to her high-school sweetheart, Stoddard realized that her husband was an alcoholic. Nonetheless, the young, energetic couple was determined to make it work and, when conception failed, to adopt a child. Stoddard captures the journey of her marriage, her adoption and her eventual divorce through a series of surprisingly upbeat, idiosyncratic anecdotes that provide a window into the life of an ordinary couple. Tragic moments of the author’s travails with her husband’s alcoholism–including his violent attempts to keep her out of AA meetings–mingle with lighthearted reminiscences of her son’s early years as a precocious child. Stoddard is careful never to probe too deeply into the pain of her marriage or the emotional difficulties of divorce, choosing instead to focus on the practical pratfalls of parenting, like the hiring of a series of young and inept live-in nannies. She hires seven of them over the course of a few years, each bringing a unique brand of chaos to the Stoddard family–one invites a married man over at night, another has a substance-abuse problem, another leaps from being excruciatingly shy to embarrassingly provocative. Stoddard balances her role as an employer with the necessity of being a de facto parent to these would-be caregivers. The author’s job begins to require an increasing amount of travel, and her ex-husband’s escalating destructive behavior forces her to make difficult decisions about her son’s relationship with his father. Yet the anecdotes court the unspoken traumas without further analyzing the emotional effect on mother and son. Stoddard only provides a survey of young Matt’s adolescence, as viewed through family vacations, the death of pets, holidays, etc. The generally sophisticated and congenial prose style and anecdotal structure make for a pleasant read, but readers may wonder at the author’s unwillingness to go deeper.
A warm portrait of motherhood and the struggles of being a single parent.Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-37697-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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