Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing.
Orenstein (Schoolgirls, 1994, etc.) chronicles her tortuous journey to motherhood.
The author was 35, involved in a busy, successful career as a journalist and ambivalent about having a child, when her filmmaker husband broached the subject. A diagnosis of breast cancer six weeks later put the baby plans on hold, and Orenstein was 36 before she began trying in earnest to get pregnant. Her witty presentation of such nitty-gritty details as temperature charts, cervical-mucous consistency, sperm counts and timed intercourse at first make her memoir an amusing read. The mood shifts, however, with a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage, followed by another and then a third. One of the book’s most moving chapters, which appeared in slightly different form in the New York Times Magazine, recounts the author’s visit to a Buddhist temple in Tokyo; red-capped statues of infants lined the temple’s shady path, offering ritual acknowledgement of the loss felt by women who miscarry a fetus (a taboo subject in the West). Orenstein’s obsession with becoming pregnant increasingly placed a strain on her marriage. It eventually led her to spend thousands of dollars for in-vitro fertilization at clinics whose staff acted more like salesmen than doctors and treated her more like a customer than a patient. She tried acupuncture, another less-than-happy experience, and implantation of a donor egg, which failed. She and her Japanese-American husband finally decided to adopt a Japanese baby boy. That red-tape-snarled transaction became even more complicated when Orenstein discovered she was again pregnant. Would she end up with two babies, one or none? The answer is in the title.
Intimate, funny/sad and remarkably self-revealing.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-017-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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