A welcome guide for new grandparents and their children looking to savor the joys and navigate the pitfalls of...
Award-winning broadcast journalist Stahl (Reporting Live, 1999) shares the joys of being a grandmother.
The author began her career reporting on Watergate and has been a top correspondent for 60 Minutes for the past 25 years. Fortunately, her husband, author and screenwriter Aaron Latham, was able to assume a significant share of the responsibility for their only child, Taylor, leaving Stahl free to pursue her demanding career. In 2011, with the birth of her first grandchild, Jordan, she “was jolted, blindsided by a wall of loving more intense than anything I could remember or had ever imagined.” As someone who has covered suicide bombings in Israel and walked the streets of New York City on 9/11, she had considered herself to be unflappable. She experienced what she describes as an infatuation. Startled, she decided to investigate the importance of the role grandparents can play in the lives of their children and grandchildren. They often help financially, of course, and frequently step in as babysitters or even nannies to ease the burden on parents who are both working. “One in ten American children lives with a grandparent,” writes Stahl, “and a third of them count on their grandparents as their primary caretakers.” For the majority of grandparents, the responsibility is a sought-after joy rather than a burden, and grandparenting often provides a new lease on life for empty nesters. However, in cases of poverty, this may not be the case, especially when grandparents are called upon to assume full parenting and financial responsibilities. For Stahl, it was a second chance to experience the joys of parenting, but she had to continually remind herself not to criticize or give unwanted advice. Through the medium of her own experiences, the author delivers a wise and witty book.
A welcome guide for new grandparents and their children looking to savor the joys and navigate the pitfalls of grandparenting.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16815-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
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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