A disarming and casually hilarious take on the opposite of co-parenting.
A fertility memoir with a whiff of Tristram Shandy.
British journalist Brockes (She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me, 2013, etc.) recounts the process by which she and “L” decided to bear children as single, working mothers in a nontraditional but loving relationship. The author spent her 20s in the grip of an all-consuming dream job: writing for the Guardian. The sudden breakup of a three-way work marriage (one of her best friends fell pregnant) propelled her all the way to New York and onto the path toward having not just one baby, but twins, all by herself. Her eccentric narrative hazes over the challenges of same-sex parenting to focus on the fertility industry and the alternative structure that she and L created to make up for their hopeless incompatibility as live-in partners. They found matching apartments on different floors of the same Upper West Side high rise, which enabled them to bring the kids together regularly, but each woman parented her own children to suit herself. Brockes plays up the contrast in fertility treatment styles between England and the U.S., but while she extols the stolidity and sensibility of her national health care birthright, she can’t help but glory in the comparatively free-wheeling American market for intrauterine insemination and in vitro fertilization as one more indication that her adopted country is the “place where the future happens first.” Her quirky, neurotic intensity pairs well with the brisk pace she has crafted after so many years writing to deadlines, and she holds little back. The book speaks to a growing contingent of would-be parents who reach their 30s and 40s and find they have the means and motivation to have kids outside of a conventional domestic partnership, embracing their chosen single parenthood as a form of empowerment. It seems as if almost everyone bearing a child is writing a book about it, but Brockes is too original a personality to fall in quietly with the rest.
A disarming and casually hilarious take on the opposite of co-parenting.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59420-663-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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