A distinguished memoir: one of those rare insights into motherhood that describes the magical and the mundane with equal...
From Australian novelist Johnson (Hungry Ghosts, p. 128, etc.), a beautifully written and remarkably wise look at the realities of becoming a mother, as well as at the unexpected physical consequences of giving birth.
Johnson transforms what could be a conventional motherhood-survival story into an often transcendent tale of how she “became a better woman” as her life was enriched and deepened by the experience of giving birth. Until she was 35, Johnson had lived as she pleased, writing and living where she liked. But as she drove through France, her “arms began to feel empty.” Though she had regarded children with ambivalence, she suddenly “wanted to feel the weight of life . . . to enmesh [her]self in the fabric of living.” Back in London, she married fellow Australian Les and in 1995, now 38 and pregnant, flew back to Australia, where their first son, Caspar, was born. Johnson vividly describes not only her fears about bearing a healthy baby as she raced to finish Hungry Ghosts, but also those extraordinary moments of maternal exultation: seeing in a face an entire universe; the poignant awareness of the “sweet, short time [when] the past and future do not exist . . . and not one single promise has gone unfulfilled”; and the conviction that nothing in her life, not even writing a novel, has made her feel as competent. Other typical but less exalted moments include trying to breastfeed, get enough sleep, write, and deal with her lack of money. She also developed a fistula in the rectal-vaginal area, which, after her second son was born 16 months later in a botched delivery, required surgery and a temporary colostomy so that her body could heal.
A distinguished memoir: one of those rare insights into motherhood that describes the magical and the mundane with equal insight and honesty.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3296-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
