A comprehensive, empowering resource.
A guide to the trials and tribulations of second pregnancies.
In the first part of the book, Oster, author of Expecting Better, and Fox, a maternal fetal medicine specialist, offer “a general framework for how you might approach a pregnancy with or after complications.” The second part offers “condition-specific chapters.” Oster has written extensively about pregnancy, parenting, and health economics, and her goal in this book is “to bring maternal health complications into the light” and provide “an avenue toward more productive conversations with their providers.” The authors emphasize preparation of all kinds, and they cover everything from gestational diabetes and preterm birth to “severe maternal morbidity” and postpartum mental health. When it comes to records and medical history, “ground yourself in the necessity of accuracy and honesty, both for yourself and for your provider.” The authors recommend a litany of questions for medical providers, including, “Are you able to explain in simple terms what happened to me and, if you know, why it happened to me?” Throughout, the authors include instructive first-person accounts of women. Of preterm birth stories, for instance, Oster writes, “While the experiences these two women had were extremely different, the feeling of trauma is not.” Regarding the specific trauma of miscarriage, the authors are encouraging and empathetic: “The majority of miscarriages are due to a genetic abnormality in the embryo (it’s not your fault).…With time, continued trying, and sometimes interventions, nearly all couples will have a successful pregnancy (there is every reason to be optimistic).” The authors also recommend screening for preeclampsia at every prenatal visit because “it can happen to anyone without warning” and “often has no symptoms until later stages.” On every page, the authors offer extensive research and support: “It is perfectly reasonable to want a repeat cesarean. It is your birth!”
A comprehensive, empowering resource.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593652770
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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