The high level of self-awareness is at times wearying, but good writing and solid medical reporting more than compensate.
Describing with wry humor a lesbian’s search for a potential sperm donor, Aizley’s memoir makes a literate addition to the growing shelf of books altering the traditional definition of family.
Nearing 40, medical researcher and writer Aizley lives in Boston with Faith, a musician and composer. The author is ready to have a baby, but first the couple must decide on a donor: Faith wants someone they know, while Aizley prefers an anonymous source; both are Jewish and initially want a Jewish donor (“it’s a tribe thing”) who agrees that the child can make contact later in life. They begin to research the literature, Faith comes round to Aizley’s position on anonymity, and they finally locate an apparently suitable donor they nickname Baldie. His sperm arrives from California in a number of phials preserved in a tank of nitrogen, and Aizley begins insemination. After months of failure and increasing medical intervention and expenses, she fears she may be infertile, but before taking fertility-enhancing drugs, she checks to see whether Baldie has ever impregnated anyone. Learning that he hasn’t, the couple finds a new donor, half-Japanese and non-Jewish, and begins another, ultimately successful round of inseminations. Along the way, they learn that Aizley’s mother must undergo chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. As she relates in vivid detail her own medical trials—the ovulation watch and the actual inseminations, the doctors and personnel at fertility clinics—the author also movingly details her mother’s struggle with cancer. She describes frankly her jealousy of her also-pregnant younger sister, Faith’s occasionally ambivalent attitude, and fears that she can’t survive without her mother, whose cancer has spread. Relentlessly analytical, Aizley also explores the nature of her relationship with Faith, the meaning of motherhood, and of being gay.
The high level of self-awareness is at times wearying, but good writing and solid medical reporting more than compensate.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55583-755-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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