A warm, involving, and ultimately uplifting journal for mothers caught in the distracting whirlwind of caring for a new baby.
A panoramic handbook for mothers.
Ingram characterizes her nonfiction debut as “a baby book for moms,” a multivoice, multistage journal designed to chart the mother’s journey as separate from the baby’s. Ingram designs the book for maximum reader involvement; each chapter contains many themed prompts like “Looking back at the birth I think it went…” or “My baby is the most like me when....” Each chapter deals with different months and weeks of a baby’s infancy, and each section is filled with tips, funny quotes, interviews with a broad range of mothers, checklists, and a wealth of fascinating facts peppered throughout the text. “Baby gas is often caused by an immature digestive system and your baby’s inability to process milk or food items properly, or by ingesting too much air,” readers are told at one point, and “Grown-ups have exactly 206 bones, but experts disagree about exactly how many bones babies have—most say somewhere between 270 and the low 300s.” (Also, fascinatingly, research shows that the age of menopause is matrilineally determined.) All the trials and odd details of motherhood are touched upon, from mood swings to losing hair to returning to full-time work to, of course, chronic sleep deprivation, and Ingram maintains throughout a tone of upbeat humor and gentle understanding that new mothers especially will doubtless find very encouraging. The quotes from mothers in all walks and stages of life likewise reinforce a feeling of camaraderie and solidarity, and Ingram’s inclusion of inspirational and humorous quotes supplements this, constantly reminding mothers to pay attention to the positive sides of their experiences. Ingram’s prose is bright and accessible, and the book’s many moving parts are perfectly designed to keep readers entertained and involved.
A warm, involving, and ultimately uplifting journal for mothers caught in the distracting whirlwind of caring for a new baby.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73239-400-1
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Little Cow Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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