by R.J. Castille ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2018
A heartfelt cautionary tale for women of child-bearing age.
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In this memoir, a romance novelist recounts the most painful experience in her life: the loss of a baby who lived but a few hours after his premature birth.
Castille (Make It Reign, 2018, etc.), whom readers meet in the book as Renee Johnson, learned she was seven to eight weeks pregnant when she visited her doctor’s office two weeks after having a Pap smear performed. It was a routine test, but she had been bleeding ever since the procedure. A few days later, the bleeding became more severe, and her best friend, Miah Hunter, brought her to the emergency room, where the doctor determined she had suffered “a threatened miscarriage.” Still, the baby appeared to be fine, with a strong heartbeat. This was the beginning of what would be a harrowing and traumatic time. The bleeding continued, and her pregnancy hormone level was dropping, plus she was losing amniotic fluid. The medical professionals kept track of the symptoms, but apparently did not know what was causing them. Nonetheless, the author was determined to give the tiny fetus a chance to make it. The mother of three daughters, she was estranged from her husband and had custody only of her youngest child, Leigh. Her home was already bursting at the seams—she was housing her sister, Katherine, and her two children, and Hunter was also living with her. The memoir, written in the style—and with the drama—of a novel, vividly portrays the stress and chaos of the author’s path through this unexpected, high-risk pregnancy. Here, she wants to raise an issue she claims the doctors’ seemed determined to ignore: “There is nothing that anyone, anywhere can tell me to convince me that the Pap smear I had the day before I began bleeding and never stopped, was not a trigger in a series of events that eventually led to” the loss of the baby. Despite occasionally careless prose—“He sauntered into the room, still wearing the surgical scrubs and poufy had he had dawned to perform another C-Section earlier”—the narrative is compelling.
A heartfelt cautionary tale for women of child-bearing age.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71815-705-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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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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