This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous—an indispensable read for fathers (and...
A sports-obsessed memoir of fatherhood.
The delights of this fatherhood confessional are various. Perhaps most striking and unusual is Wilker’s (Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, 2010) choice of framing his narrative in the form of an almanac. The almanac becomes a moving metaphor for a universal need to organize the chaotic borders of life experience. The author divides the book into four volumes spanning the first year of his son Jack’s life. The almanac is then subdivided alphabetically, starting with Aardsma, David, ending with Zidane, Zinedine, and running a curious gamut of terms, personae, ideas and anecdotes. The first entry in Volume 4, section W, for example, is Webber, Chris—the now retired all-star NBA player. The entry beneath his name reads, “Time can’t be stopped,” referencing his disastrous timeout in the 1993 national championship game, while making light of the fact that there are no convenient timeouts in real life, either. For sports fans (who also happen to be experiencing fatherhood), Wilker’s almanac is rife with poignant, essayistic forays into these dusty corners of sports history. Perhaps the memoir’s most important takeaway is the acknowledgment that even the best of parents are sometimes faking it, doing what they can to make the world less dangerous for the young and still innocent. “When Jack was first born I didn’t know how to hold him,” writes the author, “but within a week or so the awkwardness of holding him gave way to the feeling that holding him was the thing I’d been born to do, the feeling that made me whole.”
This almanac of fatherhood (and other failures) is honest, relatable and humorous—an indispensable read for fathers (and sons) whose joy in life comes not from winning the big game but being alive to witness the beauty of its happening.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61039-401-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
