A winning and witty take on a well-covered topic.
A dryly humorous memoir/guidebook about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood by the Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist.
Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2011, etc.) was married to her husband for nearly 20 years before they decided to have children. Having always assumed, vaguely, that she would be a mother, she first wanted to focus on her writing career. Divided into several-dozen short chapters, the book offers dispatches from the frontlines of first-time parenthood. Enright gracefully moves between straight facts, disarmingly funny admissions, her own unexpected revelations and experiences and conversational second-person directives. In "Babies: A Breeder's Guide," the author organizes the narrative into categories that include “Home Birth,” “Naming,” “Burps, Burp!, Burp!,” “Evolution” and “How to Panic,” to name a few. Throughout, Enright displays a great sense of humor, calling to mind two similarly themed memoirs: Anne Lamott's Operating Instructions (1993) and Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work (2002). Enright's conclusions are far more optimistic than Cusk's, but she shares Lamott's talent for drawing the reader fully into her writing with her frank and comic tone. She's equally honest about the difficult, boring aspects of becoming a parent, although Enright's humor works better than her seriousness. While she doesn't shy away from revealing in vibrant detail the traumas and upheavals involved in pregnancy and parenthood, it's her talent for elevating otherwise menial complaints into universal truths that makes the book compelling. Fans of Enright's novels and short stories, especially parents or those contemplating parenthood, will be interested in her perspective.
A winning and witty take on a well-covered topic.Pub Date: April 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07828-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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