Sunny and inspiring.
A mother's optimistic account of the first year of life with her daughter, Nella, who was born with Down syndrome.
Photographer writer Hampton is the author of a popular blog, Enjoying the Small Things. The Florida-based mother of two has received national recognition and media attention for her blog's personal writing and, reflected in it, her perpetually glass-half-full disposition. In her debut, she provides expanded versions of stories from her blog and other details about her life, marriage and parenthood. In 2009, the 31-year-old author and her husband, Brett, already parents of a two-year-old girl, Lainey, welcomed their second daughter, Nella. Hampton describes her immediate shock and distress at Nella’s diagnosis, but those feelings were quickly replaced by an overwhelming sense of gratitude. "I feel there is a plan so beautiful in store…and we get to live it,” she writes. “Wow.” The author’s positive attitude and enthusiasm remain unchanged throughout the book, which may illicit admiration in some readers and mild irritation in others—Hampton rarely reveals her own vulnerability. The author’s descriptions of people and events are clear and easy to follow, but it's her beautiful photographs that bring them to life. A few of Hampton’s summations—e.g., "I not only hugged Fear and Sadness that night at the computer, but I let them unpack their bags and stay awhile"—come across as slightly disingenuous, if not simplistic. However, the author’s mostly appealing optimism will make this book a comfort to other parents facing difficult circumstances.
Sunny and inspiring.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-204503-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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