by M.E. Nordstrom ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2020
An insightful look at parenting for the old and young—and for those who want children or don’t.
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A man faces the challenges, terror, and humor of fatherhood after the age of 50 in this debut memoir.
Nordstrom is a self-proclaimed “old-fart father.” At the dawn of his 50s, he welcomed his son, Christian, into the world in stammering horror as he watched the baby literally cut from his wife’s body during a cesarean section. Three years later, his daughter, Alexandra, joined the family during a long and stressful birth for his wife, Mary, that left him in the corner with an oxygen mask on. But even if age brings wisdom, the author’s life before the children arrived little prepared him for parenthood—from the flying food and the unexpected dangers of bath time to the constant stickiness and piles of poop everywhere. But in these trying and humorous moments came revelations about the loss of single friends, the ins and outs of stay-at-home parenting, and perhaps most starkly, how families mark time. (“If you really looked at the old photos, you saw the same expressions...at a two-year-old’s birthday party—boredom, and the I want to leave face.…Most of those in the photos...are already dead. Maybe that’s the reason to celebrate a baby’s birth every year. To celebrate those still alive and who will be dead before the child reaches puberty.”) Nordstrom’s memoir skillfully captures a man who feels perpetually out of his depth, a new father overwhelmed by the daily problems of dirty diapers and unanswerable questions, with his greatest defense a nearly endless reserve of dark humor and dad jokes. Narrated in the first person, the book places readers in the foxhole alongside the author for every office call about “Spit Day” and irritating “Are we there yet?” in a manner that will likely make those without kids jubilant while giving parents numerous examples of why the trials are all worthwhile. In addition, there are odd, unexpected, even poetic observations, from the buildup of granola bar wrappers in a vehicle’s back seat to the way a discarded diaper soaks up bacon grease.
An insightful look at parenting for the old and young—and for those who want children or don’t.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63393-956-1
Page Count: 118
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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