A truthful picture of what it takes to bring a life into the world, exposing Achilles heels large and small.
Feisty blogger and relapsed Mormon Armstrong takes her no-holds-barred approach to life from screen to page as she dishes on the elation, transformation and despair that mark pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.
The author abandoned her rigid religious upbringing upon hitting adulthood in Los Angeles, where she developed a desire for Interpol, tequila, her husband Jon, cursing and eventually offspring. Pregnancy delivered Armstrong to the folds of Utah and the joy of her mother, here dubbed “The Avon World Sales Leader.” The Utah setting provides comic relief, as the author expatiates on her family’s five minivans and the mortal sin of bottle-feeding. Describing the period after daughter Leta was born, Armstrong occasionally interrupts her account to reprint letters she penned monthly to her budding baby. Tender yet mature in tone, these convey the miracles and catastrophes of motherhood from a perspective that contrasts interestingly with the day-to-day narrative, which reflects Armstrong’s blogger roots. Among the never-ending—and occasionally repetitive—string of incidents for which new parents are rarely prepared, she chronicles a colorful apology to a Starbucks cashier and a crazed hunt for a missing infant sock. Self-admittedly not a poster child for stability, the author chooses to give a leading role to her history with chronic depression rather than sweeping it under the rug. (Only her anatomy gets higher billing than her low spirits.) She’s forthcoming about the strain depression placed on her otherwise solid marriage and the fact that it sometimes impaired her capacity to care for Leta. Armstrong places herself on the chopping block so fellow mothers can follow her without guilt through such common experiences as the debate over pacifier abuse, the horror of hemorrhoids and the agonizing slowness of postpartum recovery.
A truthful picture of what it takes to bring a life into the world, exposing Achilles heels large and small.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-3601-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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