A talented writer delivers a miscellany about her maternal transformation.
An engaging mind offers reflections on being a mother, being a writer, and having a baby.
It would be tempting to term this slim volume “singular,” but Galchen herself (American Innovations, 2014, etc.) provides the inspirational template when she discusses The Pillow Book, written in Japan more than 1,000 years ago. That book “is difficult to characterize. It’s not a novel and not a diary and not poems and not advice, but it has qualities of each, and would have been understood at the time as a kind of miscellany, a familiar form.” Now a decidedly less familiar form, this work presents dozens of sections, some a sentence or two, none longer than a few pages, which encapsulate her experiences as her daughter matures from a newborn baby into a more mobile toddler. Or, in the author’s words, “when she began to locomote, she ceased being a puma and became a chicken.” She has almost invariably been referred to in the preceding pages as the puma, without sentiment but with a range and depth of feeling that has obviously transformed the author. None of this is offered as instructional about mothers and babies in general but about this particular baby and her effect on this particular mother—who had never intended to write this book. “I didn’t want to write about the puma,” admits Galchen. “I wanted to write about other things. Mostly because I had never been interested in babies, or in mothers….I almost hated the ‘topics.’ ” Many of these reflections concern the baby in art and literature and how having a baby affects the output of a writer. The author also traces the development of a feminist consciousness, as she describes herself as someone who mainly read books by men and had friends who were men, but finds that the years and personal circumstances have shifted her perspective.
A talented writer delivers a miscellany about her maternal transformation.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2558-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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