An accessible, insightful look at today’s modern families.
A journalist and single mom updates her memoir/social sciences book about emerging routes to parenthood.
In 2009, Lehmann-Haupt (DIY Mom, 2014, etc.) published the first edition of this work. It intertwined her first-person memoir about being a 30-something, world-traveling journalist, wondering whether she should have a child on her own, with research and interviews regarding such techniques as egg and embryo freezing. At the end of the previous edition, the author, after several disappointing romantic breakups, decided to freeze her eggs, noting, “We have more options than ever; understanding them can empower us and, perhaps most important, turn panic into peace.” In this latest edition, she adds footnotes to her previous research, including new findings that showcase how egg-freezing and related technologies have risen in popularity. She also shares the latest news from her own life, including a move from New York City to the San Francisco Bay Area and, most significantly, her decision to have a son, Alexander, at age 40, by using her frozen eggs and an anonymous but highly vetted sperm donor. Now in her mid-40s, Lehmann-Haupt is hopeful that “my husband and Alexander’s adoptive father is out there,” and she marvels at how she and other people she’s met are “on the edge of where families are evolving, consciously and creatively.” In this new edition, she gracefully combines a revealing, engaging memoir with admirably nuanced social commentary. Although she celebrates the joys of being a “DIY mom,” she also depicts its consequences and challenges, such as the idea that a sperm donor may later have contact with his myriad offspring. Readers who are interested in exploring alternative routes to parenthood will, of course, have to do further research beyond this book. But Lehmann-Haupt tees up the topic quite nicely here, in a personable, relatable voice. Her fine-tuned prose is a particular strength, as when she grieves her grandmother’s death while in the arms of a less-than-ideal boyfriend: “as he holds me I feel the generations shift.”
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9963074-5-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Nothing But The Truth Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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