A useful aggregation of timely information and personal insight that will provide clarity, if not comfort, for single women...
The executive editor of Plum, a magazine for pregnant women over 35, considers the myriad choices available to women who want children but haven’t found Mr. Right.
Lehmann-Haupt’s first book is a personal documentary; she presents statistics, interviews and analysis alongside her own story. She began research on the reproductive options for single women when she was 32, after a relationship she thought would lead to marriage and children ended. The book follows her through a six-year journey: fertility tests, online dating escapades, a serious relationship with a guy who couldn’t commit, sperm-donor shopping and finally oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) at the NYU Fertility Clinic. She interviewed mothers who were single by choice, the Italian doctors who invented the egg-freezing procedure, marketing executives from the company Extend Fertility, gay “bio dads” who donate sperm and “insta-couples” who decide to get pregnant within a year of meeting and aren’t embarrassed by a baby bump under a wedding gown. Most of the stories are positive, but Lehmann-Haupt doesn’t try to sell happy endings. Many of the procedures, including in vitro fertilization, embryo freezing and intrauterine insemination, are so physically, emotionally and financially draining that one single woman’s doctor asked her why she didn’t just have unprotected sex with a friend. The author actively reflects on important questions brought on by this modern reproductive landscape: How old is too old? Would she want her child to meet his half sisters on DonorSiblingRegistry.com? Does the ability to biologically postpone childbearing give career women rightful peace of mind or will it prevent society from “adapting to the needs of working mothers?” Adoption is addressed only briefly; this is a book for women who are mainly interested in passing on their genetic material (or their future husbands’) and in the experience of being pregnant.
A useful aggregation of timely information and personal insight that will provide clarity, if not comfort, for single women over 30 still set on having kids.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-465-00919-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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