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
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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