A page-turner by someone who stopped waiting for Mr. Perfect.
Bay Area film critic Pols chronicles her unexpected pregnancy and journey into not-quite-single motherhood.
On the brink of her 40th birthday, the surprised author discovered that she was pregnant. Knowing that her fertile years were approaching an end, she decided to have the baby even if it meant doing it alone. Decision made, the next step was to contact Matt, the 29-year-old father-to-be. He was a good one-night stand, but Pols figured he would freak out when she told him the news. On the contrary, he was immediately supportive. “Everyone wants a child,” he insisted, and so this unlikely couple embarked on a journey to unconventional parenthood. (Matt stayed involved, but they did not resume their relationship.) The author is droll and exceedingly honest about bouts of morning sickness, her search for bigger, baby-friendly digs and her son’s birth, which is described in graphic detail. She airs perfectly legitimate annoyances with her co-parent, as well as her eventual coming to terms with his character. Matt may have had trouble being a responsible adult—at the time of their fling he lived in a hovel and had no job—but he proved to be a sensitive, caring father. Pols’s habit of recounting past love affairs quickly becomes tedious, though at least she keeps sentimentality at bay. Emotions do surface at times, but raw expression of feeling seems appropriate when describing her deep grief over the loss of her parents, which coincided with her foray into motherhood. Glimpses of her professional life enliven the text, and it’s too bad there aren’t more of them: Her accounts of trying to write Marlon Brando’s obituary on a day off without childcare and of a failed attempt to breastfeed during a screening of De-Lovely are far more interesting than her frequent assessments of Matt’s self-esteem.
A page-turner by someone who stopped waiting for Mr. Perfect.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-125692-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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