Customer comments on this selection.
 Excellent
Someone recommended this novel on one of the h.s. websites and it was excellent. It was written in 1911 and it could have been written today - the issues about having only 2 children - or no children - women working, needing to provide your children with EVERYTHING if you are going to have them, it went on and on. The arguments of today for not having children were the same as 100 years ago! I was surprised.
br /
br /The Mother in question is s/t looked down upon as being a drudge/ servant with no rewards, and people wonder how she could stand having 7 children. This is what mom thought: She welcomed the fast-coming babies as gifts from God, marvelled over their tiny perfectness, dreamed over the soft relaxed forms with a heart almost too full for prayer. She was in a word, old fashioned, hopelessly out of the modern current of thoughts and events. She secretely regarded her children as marvellous, even while she laughed down their youthful conceit and punished their naughtiness.
br /
br /The story deals with the 20 smthg daughter who wants to be wealthy and limit her kids. By the end of the story she realizes that if her mother subscribed to her weatlhy friends' attitudes, she wouldn't be here. "And she had s/t wished that she and Bruce had been the only ones! Yes, came the sudden thought, but it wldn't have been Bruce and Margaret after all, it would have been Bruce and Charlie. That was what women did, then, when they denied the right of life to the distant, unwanted, possible little person!" and it goes on and on and I loved it : )
br /
br /It is a beautifully written story, easy to read. I was concerned that it would be too preachy, but it isn't. I didn't want to put it down.
br /
br /This woman wrote over 50 books, but this is the only one still in the Los Angeles library system.
br /
br /I think Doug Phillips' (of Vision Forum Ministries) quote applies here:
br /
br /The Bible calls debt a curse and children a blessing. But in our
br /culture, we apply for a curse and reject a blessing. Something is
br /terribly wrong with this picture.
br /
Mother: a name most dear
A touching story of a young girl who goes into the world to find what her heart desires. She is rather selfish, and scorns the poor women who stay at home, spending their time on their families. In the end, she realizes that really wants to be a loving, Godly wife and mother, like her own mother. When I began this book, I was a bit sceptical. I thought, "This isn't the type of girl I would want to emulate, or bother reading about." But I cried at the end, and highly recommend this book.
indictment of selfishness
This book is a wonderful indictment of the ever-strengthening trend of modern day selfishness exalted in consumerism and the fascination with wealth and leisure.
br /
br /The praises of motherhood are sung, especially motherhood which embraces large families for the simple reason that children are blessings. Thankfully, the Nancy Campbell-style legalism (which many believe COMMANDS women to get up off their birthing beds, wake up their husbands and get to work on the next baby) is avoided entirely. "And the Lord BLESSED them...." How did He bless them? With fertility and children. Look up Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1 and decide for yourself. No doubt children are blessings and no doubt having a large family is a wonderful, wonderful blessing to which I can attest (I have five children and would love to have more). However, the emphasis here is upon the reasons children are blessings - to one another and also to their parents who are given opportunity to live a life of selfless giving.
br /
br /The end of the book appropriately contrasts the impact of the life lived in the light of death. The daughter/protagonist of the virtuous mother has worked for a wealthy, self-absorbed woman whose life is "busy," but with details which hold no eternal weight. The other woman, the protagonist's mother, has spent her life in selfless service to her beloved husband and many children. She is happy and content in this, having learned the secret to happiness is living a life in service to others. Although neither woman has died, the daughter/ protagonists imagines the funerals of her mother and her employer in her mind. She then comes to the inexorable conclusion that her wealthy employer would not truly be missed, by her wealthy socialite friends, her husband, or even by her own children. She is not central to their lives or well-being, having abandoned her opportunity to invest herself in them. The book is encouraging and inspiring to those whose vision of selfless parenting is under attack.
 Polemical Without Being Bold About It
"To be encouraged to ask for a favor and then refused it," Kathleen Norris wrote, "is an experience all impoverished friends of all comfortably rich persons know. 'You taught me first to bed, and now--you teach me how a beggar should be answered,' says Shakespears's Portia. But it is not only the poor who feels life's endless snubs; they are no respectors of persons." Norris writes about the genesis of MOTHER in her 1959 autobiography FAMILY GATHERING. As a staunch Roman Catholic she and her husband, the brother of the late San Francisco novelist Frank (McTEAGUE) Norris, were appalled by the spread of the birth control movement in the first decade of the century, and she wrote MOTHER hoping to raise the self-image of women who chose to become mothers, and to a certain extent it worked. Former President Theodore Roosevelt named it as one of his favorite books, and honored the impecunious, Bohemian couple by showing up at ther flat for an impromptu dinner. With growing celebrity she became intimate friends with the Lunts, Noel Coward, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Addison and Wilson Mizner, and other famous people of the day.
br /
br /Her friendship with fellow pop novelist Edna Ferber came to a bad end. Ferber could never forgive Norris for going to Germany in the 1930s and accepting the honors bestowed on her by a grateful Adolf Hitler. Norris returned from Berlin to find that her public had largely deserted her due to her Nazi connections. She wasn't really a Nazi, just a Pacifist and you might say an isolationist, like Charles Lindbergh (another of her friends) and like Lindbergh her once proud name was stained with Nazi obloquy. Yet she was a talented novelist and it's a sign of the times that she is so forgotten today and another woman with the same name is reaping the rewards of having a name people think they've already heard. MOTHER, a tract against what she called "race suicide," is one of her very best novels.
Mother by Kathleen Norris
This was a very heart-stirring book for me. When I reached the end, I found myself weeping. I subsequently gave the book to a friend, who found it so inspiring that she is afraid to loan it out to others for fear it will get lost and she will no longer have it in her possession. We believe it is a book that all young women should be required to read.
|
