A nice grrrl, but not much of a riot.
A rock ’n’ roll girl embraces motherhood, pens self-indulgent memoir.
Journalist McDonnell (the Miami Herald, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone) recounts her evolution from countercultural “riot grrrl” to relatively conventional wife and mother in thoughtful, engaging prose—but so what? Essentially a rather uneventful memoir disguised as cultural commentary, the book feints and parries with an interesting theme—the politically progressive/artistic woman’s horror of motherhood—but it mostly concerns itself with making a case for McDonnell’s coolness. She has the credentials: A graduate of the ’80s hipster paradise Brown University, McDonnell went on to live in Greenwich Village, pursue a career as a music journalist, participate in feminist political actions, start an alternative ’zine and generally stick it to The Man. There are a few references to the knee-jerk anti-baby sentiment popular with her crowd, but McDonnell is more interested in detailing her romantic relationships, her supportive relationship with her gay brother, her professional ups and downs and her groovy political activism; the effect is that of an unusually well-written journal of a typical middle-class, city-dwelling hipster in the ’80s and ’90s: self-absorbed, clever and likely completely uninteresting to another living soul. Her grating tendency to paraphrase rock lyrics at random moments (on her appreciation of nature: “wild things, I think I love you) doesn’t help matters. When, fairly late in the proceedings, McDonnell gets to the motherhood material, her descriptions of life with her unlettered carpenter husband, his troubled teen daughters and their baby son have a degree of charm (and would serve as a dandy premise for a smart dramedy for the Lifetime network). What’s missing is a compelling analysis of her change in attitude toward maternity; culturally and politically, McDonnell seems much the same with children. There are changes in priorities and lifestyle post-kids—but doesn’t this happen to everyone?
A nice grrrl, but not much of a riot.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7382-1054-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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