An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.
A writer and life advice expert tells the story of how an unexpected teen pregnancy taught her unforgettable lessons in humility and courage.
At 17, Chicago native Pryor (What Did I Do Wrong?: When Women Don't Tell Each Other the Friendship Is Over, 2006) had everything going for her: loving parents, wealth, and, most importantly of all, a bright future. Then the high school senior discovered she was pregnant. Because her family was Catholic, abortion was not an option. Anxious to keep up appearances, Pryor’s mother, Dorothy, located a home for unwed mothers in Indiana where she left her daughter to give birth before returning to Chicago and attending graduation. Feeling trapped “in [her] body [and] her life,” Pryor immediately realized that the “home” her mother had chosen was really a government-run facility for poor and delinquent girls that looked and felt like a prison. Dorothy made special arrangements for her daughter to be able to come and go as she pleased, but this made no difference since the facility was “in the middle of nowhere.” The food was “gnarly bad,” and the “school” consisted of a single room with a few magazines and books and no teacher. Living mostly on vending machine snacks and food from care packages, Pryor felt alone and frightened among the street-wise girls she met. But soon she found that beneath the tough exteriors of her fellow mothers-to-be were fears and vulnerabilities—about pregnancy, giving birth, and life itself—that matched her own. As she drew closer to the girls, the author also came into awareness of how many more choices her socially privileged status had given her, including the one to give her baby up for adoption. Pryor’s refusal to bury the truth of her experiences is the greatest strength of her book. Her honesty about a youthful error and desire to let that honesty define the rest of her life are both uplifting and inspiring.
An unsentimental yet moving coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9800-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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