After nine months and a healthy birth, the author’s love of cooking has shifted to a love of nurturing. Churchwell delivers...
A funny and informative memoir of a husband who grows from a disgruntled observer of his wife’s pregnancy to an active, even co-pregnant partner.
Churchwell has written for magazines, television, and medical centers (which helps him to negotiate the wealth of medical and scientific information camouflaged within his wit). The greatest dangers of pregnancy and parenthood, as initially seen by this Gen-X, yuppie author, are the threats they pose to his perfect, self-indulgent lifestyle. Friends warn him that sex will change (and his wife will soon resemble a “hard boiled egg on stilts”) and they’ll no longer be welcome in movie theaters and finer restaurants. His pregnant and transformed wife, however, forces the author to realize that “men don't really live in their bodies,” whereas “women carry time in theirs.” Churchwell is intimidated by the husband’s limited role in this consuming adventure, and feels “reduced to being a barnyard animal at your own nativity.” At first, he resents his wife buying a baby seat and clothes for a fetus the size of a dragonfly nymph, but soon he gets sympathetic symptoms of pregnancy, including morning sickness. Churchwell’s frightening new life revolves around OB/GYN appointments, and he discovers other husbands who felt abandoned (and even some who broke off relationships during pregnancy). Some anxiety is relieved viewing humorous pregnancy scenes from TV archives, and even more from the amniocentesis promising a healthy daughter. After a boot-camp scenario of birthing exercises, the memoir is taken over by the natural birth vs. hospitals debate. The newly sensitized author explains that, with the impersonalized (albeit sterile) conditions of hospitals, the midwives’ case has its merits.
After nine months and a healthy birth, the author’s love of cooking has shifted to a love of nurturing. Churchwell delivers a bundle of anxious joy and gives us hope that parenthood can drag children, kicking and screaming, into adulthood.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-039345-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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