A spirited portrait of an unconventional family.
An unexpected double pregnancy surprises and challenges a publishing executive and her rock-guitarist girlfriend.
The importance of starting a family became paramount for Ellis, vice president of marketing for Real Simple, and her girlfriend Henderson shortly after the New York couple met at a Manhattan lesbian bar in the mid ’90s and began a relationship after reuniting there years later. Ellis recalls growing up business-minded at a young age, eager and determined to leave her Staten Island roots. Once her career took off, however, she struggled with the constant cloaking of her sexuality. Henderson was drawn to music early and enjoyed forming girl bands in high school. She experienced a Lilith Fair performance in college and, together with all-girl rock band Antigone Rising, was signed by a major label in 2003. Both writers braved a series of unsound lesbian relationships before embarking on their own together. Soon committed to each other and carefully contemplating their future—Ellis in New York nurturing her publishing career, Henderson on the road with her band—talk of children surfaced as both yearned for a child. The authors describe their misadventures in ovulation cycles, sperm donors and the clinical insemination process, which was decidedly unromantic and highly stressful as false positives and a heartbreaking miscarriage crushed their hopes. With determination and the aid of medical science, both conceived simultaneously. After the births, they faced complex legalities regarding adoption and religion. Ellis warns: “When you’re a gay woman contemplating motherhood, you will be affected by politics—whether you like it or not.” Undaunted, Ellis and Henderson remain bright, engaging narrators, each evoking separate histories and private sentiments in alternating chapters that differentiate and complement each other. The book is dedicated to their children Thomas and Kate, “our perfect storm.”
A spirited portrait of an unconventional family.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7640-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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