A pleasant and simple book about dying that is very much about living.
An illustrator daughter and her writer mother combine on a graphic volume of advice from the dead to the living.
The introduction by Los Angeles–based Bateman (Brave New Work, 2017) suggests that she was troubled since girlhood by fears of death and by her mother’s death in particular. One night, she writes, “I allowed myself to vividly imagine my mom’s death, to feel the pain of the moment I learned she was gone.” Such intimations of mortality gave birth to this book, as the two collaborated on what advice the mother could impart to the daughter from beyond the grave, first day by day and then proceeding through the stages of life, when the daughter will find herself facing the same fate that she imagines for her mother. “Your parent’s death is nature’s way of breaking the shocking news to you that it’s your turn next,” begins the advice on Day 21, which is titled, “Take a Hike.” There are many different activities suggested for distraction in the days immediately following the death of one’s mother, along with recipes (the sort that might pass through a family) and, eventually, advice for taking stock, moving on, and maturing into a person who will face the end of her own life. The advice is always warm and often wise, accompanied by illustrations that often reflect a playfulness reminiscent of Roz Chast. This isn’t a morbid book, nor a particularly dark one, but a book about facing the inevitable with grace and good humor. By the time you reach “Day 17,000: Show compassion,” you realize that this life is all we have, so you might as well make the most of it: “Be kind to yourself. No matter your age, you deserve clean clothes and a hot meal and good company."
A pleasant and simple book about dying that is very much about living.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-968-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
In traditional Jewish ritual, men are usually the primary subjects or objects: They are circumcised, they take a woman in marriage, they say kaddish over the death of a loved one. Recently, Jewish women have been plumbing the tradition in an attempt to become the subjects of their own ritual lives. Bat mitzvahs were only the beginning: In recent years, Jewish women have created new, or revised, ceremonies to mark all the joyous, and sad, transitions in their lives, from birth to becoming a parent to aging. Here, Rabbi Orenstein, who teaches at the Univ. of Judaism, provides a compendium of these rituals. Rabbi Einat Ramon explains how she and her husband, also a rabbi, wrote an egalitarian ketubbah, or marriage contract. Rabbi Amy Eilberg adapts traditional mourning ceremonies to mark the grief of a miscarriage. Barbara D. Holender offers a ceremony on turning 65. A useful resource for the paradoxically ever-evolving tradition of Judaism.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-879045-14-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Jewish Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.
A memoir of a woman in progress, this volume describes the 20 years spent raising two sons to be sensitive, responsible, independent—and, hopefully, to pick up their socks.
"Do you mistake me for June Cleaver?'' says Blakely (Wake Me When It's Over, 1989) with heavy irony to a member of the adolescent male pack that moved in and out of her house chomping on Oreos as her sons were growing up. Not a chance. In these reflections, Blakely often mirrors the experiences of middle-class women who were reinventing themselves and their roles during the feminist wave of the 1970s and '80s. Married, working first simply to bring in money and then to build a career (as a writer and lecturer), divorced, strategizing as a single mother (never kite checks on the grocer, advised a more experienced friend), Blakely early on refuses to accept the burden that mothers are solely responsible for the behavior of their children. "Even if I had managed to prevent my sons' exposure to sexist or violent images at home, I could not have prevented encounters [in]...locker rooms...movies...newsstands that displayed women as cheesecake every day,'' she says. Among the best chapters is the dramatic recounting of Blakely's own mother's metaphorical shock treatments at the hands of the psychiatric establishment as she sought help for her manic-depressive son, Blakely's brother. Also thought-provoking are telling discussions of the economic and societal obstacles facing single (or would-be-single) mothers and surprisingly empathetic observations about the surge of physical power in the adolescent male. Yet Blakely frequently refers to her sons as "jocks,'' to many, a term as derogatory as "airheads'' would be for daughters. Parallel to that, she seems to regard sports as a male prerogative—a serious lapse of the feminist consciousness she eloquently espouses.
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-052-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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