by Kassi Underwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017
A poignant memoir about the years of healing that are often required after having an abortion.
How one woman overcame the traumatic experience of abortion.
Essayist Underwood, who studies at Harvard Divinity School and co-hosts the "Spiritually Blonde" podcast, was caught by surprise with her pregnancy at age 19. She always imagined being a virgin until marriage, marrying a man she loved, and having their first child a few years after the wedding. “My first pregnancy was supposed to be about joy,” she writes. However, she believed that, despite the suffering involved, she needed the abortion since the baby, a failed relationship with the father, and being in love with someone else were all the wrong things at the wrong time. Then she spent years trying to overcome the incredible sadness she felt afterward. Underwood intimately describes the events leading up to her relationship with Noah, a drug dealer and user, while the man she truly loved, “Will-B,” was in the military and overseas. She also chronicles the abortion and the tactics she used to move on. These included a Buddhist ceremony commonly used in Japan to help women move beyond abortion, a Roman Catholic retreat, a water baby ritual, meditation, consultations with a representative from Planned Parenthood, and more. Through it all, she continued to struggle with her true feelings about her relationship with Will-B, where the timing of any declarations of love was always out of sync. Underwood’s writing effectively exposes her emotional conflicts about her abortion as well as those of the many women with whom she discussed this often taboo subject. The author shines a personal light on the dilemma that women face when they have to juggle their own needs and desires with a biological accident that has the power to completely change their lives, whether they birth the child or not.
A poignant memoir about the years of healing that are often required after having an abortion.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245863-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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