Mother

Rating:
Summary: Polemical Without Being Bold About It
Review: "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.

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.

Rating:
Summary: A realistic view of the joys of motherhood
Review: I happened on this book in my husband's grandfather's barn. I read it and felt a kinship with the mother depicted in this great story of family life. Motherhood entails small sacrifices that bring great reward. This story will warm and strengthen mothers around the world now as I am sure it did when it was first published.

Rating:
Summary: Good book.
Review: Kathleen Norris was an excellent writer, but there appear to be two. One reader earlier commented on this. You need to differentiate between these two authors. The earlier one died in the sixties and didn't write on religious themes.

Rating:
Summary: Mother by Kathleen Norris
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Mother by Kathleen Norris
Review: 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.