Reviews for The Comeback:

“Keller profiles women who successfully returned to the work force in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, offering reassurance to women who have spent years raising children and want to return to work.”—New York Times Book Review , New and Notable section

“For mothers contemplating a return to the work force after years spent raising children, Emma Gilbey Keller has good news: if the women she profiles in her new book can do it, so can you.”—New York Times Book Review

"Missing from the last decade's worth of books about motherhood and work -- whether denouncing women for having children too early or too late, for working too much or too little -- has been the fact that most women with children change or redefine their careers as their children are born and grow. Unlike the straight and logical career path we may have imagined for ourselves as children, the road most mothers walk is crooked and non-linear. For the women profiled in Emma Gilbey Keller's The Comeback, the journey from career to children and back to work again involved just such meanderings. Keller, wife of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, is a journalist and author of a biography of Winnie Mandela; she is also the mother of two daughters. For her new book, she talked with seven women from diverse fields -- a doctor, a furniture designer, an occupational therapist among them -- and chronicles how each first left the world of paid work, then came back. Although every woman has her own story, all returned to the working world fundamentally changed, and each in turn made changes: She shifted her career's focus or entered an entirely new field; she lobbied for and won an agreement to job-share or work part-time; she chose a new job for its easy commute or child-friendly environment. These working women need the intellectual challenges that motherhood alone can't supply, yet they can never go back to "just" working as they did before babies (and as most fathers seem remarkably able to do, year after year, feminist wave after feminist wave). They bring with them a new skill set honed by years of playgroups and preschools -- as Keller writes, "telling mothers to network is a bit like telling them to breathe" -- a crucial insight all too often forgotten by women who find themselves worried about resumé gaps. Still, The Comeback speaks of, and to, a subset of women who have so benefited from feminism that they can afford to be agonized by an array of choices. The women Keller describes, who can (mostly) afford not to work at all, face crises of confidence, but they do not face starvation if they choose to return to work a bit later than originally planned. Keller offers a compelling set of individual solutions to a common problem; one of these days, though, it would be interesting to hear about schemes hatched by women without top-notch academic degrees and well-placed friends."—The Washington Post

“[A] must-have book…inspiring.”—New York Daily News

“Warm, laudatory, refreshingly nonjudgmental…Women contemplating their own re-entries into their careers or into new professions will relish this book for its frankness, encouragement and practical direction.”—Publishers Weekly

"Keller immediately loses the objective third-party position of journalist, her previous career, to actively comment on her seven subjects’ lives in this collection of life stories so personal that readers wince with pain at the challenges and cheer with real glee for the successes. Although it’s not a new genre, this persona of participatory ego–reporter brings a candid yet gentle tone to the recaps of these women’s careers, marriages (with one divorce), and families. Not all hail from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and they do not all enjoy 100 percent unfettered and nonpainful lives. Meet Lauren Jacobson, South African media lawyer who moved to England to escape fear of violence—and became a well-known charity’s managing director; or Maxine Snider, with a design career that morphed into ownership of a furniture manufacturer (much to the consternation of her retired-lawyer husband, until he found his second passion in photography). All talk about choices, balance, and trade-offs."—Barbara Jacobs, Booklist