by Lisa Catherine Harper ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2011
A sweet, immediate articulation of the experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood.
With a stiff measure of gallows humor, Harper (MFA Program/Univ. of San Francisco) rides the physical, mental and emotional waves churned by impending motherhood.
The author was 35 when she became pregnant for the first time, and she faced the adversities of being an older mother, especially the hormones that “played on my system like friendly demons.” The second trimester replaced nausea with a hunger so deep it felt primitive—one of Harper’s appealing characteristics is the elemental, primal sensibility she brought to pregnancy—a manic nesting urge and the quickening that came with the first felt movement of the baby. Then came sciatica, and her body grew ponderous, as did her mind, a dumb happiness of contentment. There was discomfort and pain throughout the pregnancy, but labor introduced her to the genuine article: “each contraction, its beginning, its swollen, mind-splitting climax, its slow release.” After enduring 40 hours of labor, her smile returned as she and her husband left the hospital, feeling like a couple of miscreants who had found a bag of money that didn’t belong to them: “How could we have been entrusted with such a thing? What were we to do now?” With her new daughter, Harper’s borders shrunk, and her life became minimized. Though she was nearly undone by the tedium of a mother’s chores, she writes, “if the crushing love that I felt for her made me newly and forever fearful of morality…there was something else, too, something with wings rising now like hope, or gratitude, or grace.”
A sweet, immediate articulation of the experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3508-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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