Engagingly personal tales of an underreported stage of life.
Writers confront their experiences of menopause and its aftermath.
Novelist and memoirist Yuknavitch here collects 13 personal essays, including one of her own, representing women at various stages of life, from different cultures, and with a range of feelings about hot flashes, mood swings, and the fact that, as Pam Houston sardonically notes, “Post-menopause, like it or not, death is the next big thing.” In the lively “She-Dandy,” Darcey Steinke considers menopause in other species, like the killer whale pod led by a postmenopausal female that strikes the author as “otherly, smelly, powerful, ridiculously awake.” Several of the essays make it clear that the story of menopause is inevitably tangled up in the stories of life as a whole. It’s an easy transition for Monica Drake—up to the time when her husband leaves her in a messy divorce, and the symptoms of menopause mix inextricably with feelings of rage and sorrow. Some of the best essays provide a view from the other side of menopause. Julia Alvarez sensitively finds her way by reaching out for “stories to steer by” and looks to older women as “muses to help me get wherever I was going.” Yuknavitch’s concluding essay nests her own wrenching experience of menopause into an extended footnote inside an uplifting meditation about the possibilities of change, in which she tells her readers that “you are not alone, but you are going to have to conjure your own story.” Not so much a map as an invitation to explore fearlessly one’s own unique experience, the book provides a chorus of generally calm, comforting, and often surprisingly humorous voices.
Engagingly personal tales of an underreported stage of life.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781538765548
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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