A tender memoir that combines the deep sadness of loss with the joys of parenthood even under incredibly trying...
Within hours of giving birth, Liz Logelin died of a pulmonary blood clot, leaving her husband Matt as sole caretaker of their daughter Madeline.
From their first meeting in 1996, they experienced a story-book romance and were blessed with close family and friends, good jobs and a new home. With their first child on the way, things began to fall apart when Liz became so nauseated that she couldn't keep food down and began to lose weight. This affected their unborn child, who was being starved of nutrients. There were other complications, as well. As a result, Liz went on bed rest and was then hospitalized, and the premature delivery of the baby seven weeks before its due date became necessary. Faced with a double calamity—his wife's death and a premature infant to care for—Matt wondered how he could manage. While friends and family rallied around him and his employer gave him generous paid leave of absence, he was completely unprepared for the responsibilities of single-parenthood. The author writes movingly of how his grief mingled with joy as his tiny infant thrived under his care and he began to piece his life back together. Seven months later, with Maddy in day care, he returned to work. Gradually, through the Internet, he met and bonded with others in similar circumstances, and he continued to maintain close ties with his friends and relatives.
A tender memoir that combines the deep sadness of loss with the joys of parenthood even under incredibly trying circumstances.Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-56430-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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