A readable, useful, and caring approach to the intensely personal elements of infertility and childbirth.
A guide offers a holistic, wide-ranging strategy for creating a healthy pregnancy experience.
When considering the complicated topics of the desire for a baby, the problems of infertility, and the experience of pregnancy, Murphy invokes the familiar image of an iceberg. All the various difficulties facing a pregnancy—endometriosis, miscarriages, unexplained infertility—are the visible portion, and underneath are emotional issues like fear, anger, frustration, abandonment, and betrayal. “If you can overcome the bigger part of the iceberg,” she writes, “then the top will melt away on its own.” For readers asking themselves the elemental questions that spring from such concerns—Why can’t I get pregnant? Why am I stressing out? Why don’t I feel worthy?—the author urges an inward look. She encourages the audience to not only explore physical factors as simple as breathing patterns, but also broader environmental concerns. These include how pregnancy itself is viewed by the person’s family and immediate support group, the “fertility lineage” that becomes so important when complications arise. She discusses in depth how this lineage—abandonment, abuse, abortion, betrayal, and bereavement—can adversely alter pregnancy chances. She offers a variety of methods to increase those chances and overcome obstacles that some of her readers may not have been aware of in the first place. It’s a remarkably empathetic and all-encompassing approach, drawn from Murphy’s own life experiences and from years counseling people who were trying to start a family. One of the book’s few shortcomings is the emphasis it places on the psychological. The “three b’s” of infertility, for example, are given as “betrayal, bitterness, bereavement” when by far the most likely B in such circumstances will be biology. But the heartfelt psychological framework offers many comforts even in those cases. Pregnant readers and those wanting to become pregnant will find much food for thought here.
A readable, useful, and caring approach to the intensely personal elements of infertility and childbirth.Pub Date: July 28, 2022
ISBN: 9781982285548
Page Count: 176
Publisher: BalboaPressUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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