Mika Brzezinkski’s motherhood/career memoir opens with her in an emergency room — frantic — holding her infant daughter. She fears that her daughter has suffered brain injury after an overtired Brzezinski fell down the stairs carrying her baby after working overnight shifts at CBS. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of trying to have it all, but strangely placed within the context of her own somewhat successful story of achieving All Things at Once.
The fact that I had not heard of TV news journalist Mika Brzezinksi (formerly of CBS news and currently the cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe) didn’t dampen my interest in the book. I enjoy reading books written by “successful” women who are trying to raise families alongside their careers.
Yes, I put “successful” in quotes. Read the rest of my review, and enter to win a copy at 5 Minutes for Mom.
Jennifer Donovan never really wanted to have all things at once. You can read more about her attempts at keeping all her balls in the air at her blog Snapshot.
I confess I never heard of this woman until this book came out! Yikes — falling down the stairs while carrying the baby — I’d have been hysterical. My non-fiction read at the moment is a book on how to create a business you can sell, if you want to (as opposed to a book on how to sell a business — quite a different matter). It’s a very readable book, Built to Sell, written by a guy (John Warrillow) who’s been there and failed at doing that and has turned that experience into good information for the rest of us. He says he got more out of his failure than anything he did right. There’s even a sellability index tool for business owners to use to see if they have a sellable business and how much money they might get for it. (Very useful these days!)