A woman finds God and learns forgiveness as she confronts her contentious relationship with her adoptive mother in this memoir.
As she approached her 40th birthday, publicist and event planner Easterly (Lights, Camera, Action, 2007) was facing the imminent death of her mother. For many years, the author had been trying to come to terms with her feelings of anger toward her parent, and over the past two, their relationship had become especially difficult. Now, she was determined to resolve her conflicting emotions and help her mom negotiate a peaceful, loving passage to the next world. The author was adopted when she was just two days old—“a ‘grey-market adoption’ with shady circumstances,” she writes—and although she knew of her adopted status, she and her mother almost never discussed it. Her mom relied on the conventions of the day, telling her simply that she was specially “chosen.” “But ‘chosen’ was nowhere near what I felt inside,” Easterly writes. “Inside, I felt abandoned, discarded, unimportant.” She did well in school, but was timid and shy, with numerous fears (including a terror of thunderstorms) that her mother would shrug off with humor. As an adult, Easterly began reading the works of Nancy Newton Verrier, “an adoptive mother and psychotherapist focused on separation and loss in adoption.” She was especially taken with Verrier’s theory of the “Primal Wound,” described by that author as “the death of the baby soul….the overall feeling is a betrayal of the universe, of God, of the cosmos, of the infinite being.” Readers may or may not accept the theory that a 2-day-old infant experiences psychological trauma at the time of adoption. However, Easterly’s memoir contains a great deal of valuable information that may be helpful to adoptive parents, and to adoptees who feel a loss of biological connection. Some readers may find that the later sections, in which Easterly shares her two-way conversations with God, stretch credulity, but devoutly religious ones will likely take comfort in her spiritual account.
A complicated but vividly portrayed search for identity.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-60195-3
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Heart Voices
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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