JM Barrie & the Lost Boys. Andrew Birkin & Sharon Goode. 2003. 336p. Yale University Press. JM Barrie, novelist, playwright, and author of Peter Pan, led a life almost as magical and interesting as his famous creation. Childless in his marriage, Barrie grew close to the five young boys of the Llewelyn Davies family, ultimately becoming their guardian and devoted surrogate father when they were orphaned. Andrew Birkin draws extensively on a vast range of material by and about Barrie, including notebooks, memoirs, and hours of recorded interviews with the Llewelyn Davies family and their circle, to describe Barrie’s life and the wonderful world he created for the boys. Originally published in 1979, this enchanting and richly illustrated account is reissued with a new preface and additional illustrations on the release of Finding Neverland, a film based on Barrie’s relationship with the Davies family, and the centenary of Peter Pan in 2004. About the Author: Andrew Birkin has written many screenplays, including The Name of the Rose with Alain Godard and The Story of Joan of Arc with Luc Besson. He is currently writing the script for Patrick Suskind’s Perfume.

Just the Way You Are: How Heredity & Experience Create the Individual. Winifred Gallagher. 1997. 256p. Randon House. A highly readable fusion of hard science and cutting-edge psychology, this text not only raises, but answers the age-old central questions of human individuality such as: Who am I? Was I born that way? Why are my relatives so different from me? Or so similar? How much can I influence my children? Can I change? Find out the answers in this celebration of the wonders and mysteries of being human.

Kinship: It’s All Relative. Jackie Smith Arnold. 1991. 66p.; 2000. 123p. (2nd Edition). Genealogical Publishing Company. We pursue it as a hobby and search for it in the most out-of-the-way places. yet few of us actually know very much about kinship. For instance, do you know the degree of blood relationship, or consanguinity, between yourself and your first cousins? Between third cousins and second cousins once removed? Do you know anything at all about the removes? Do you understand the difference between a greataunt and a grandaunt? Or between a cousin-german and a cater cousin? And what about double first cousins? If you’re a little vague about any of this, then this book is for you. In clear, practical terms it explains everything there is to know about kinship; about agnate and cognate kinship, collateral and fictive kinship, the kinship connection of orphans, foundlings, foster children, and adopted children. Everything! Twice as long as the first edition, with all new chapters on the subjects of marriage, names, and wills (kinship and the rights of inheritance), and with expanded treatment of other subjects, such as degrees of consanguinity and how to calculate blood relationships, this new second edition of Jackie Arnold’s acclaimed Kinship: It’s All Relative is now more authoritative than ever.

Let My Heart Be Broken. Richard Gehman. 1960. 245p. McGraw. Account of Dr. Daniel Poling and his World Vision, Inc., in dealing with the World War II orphans and child adoption.

Love Letters: Responding to Children in Pain. Doris Sanford. 1991. 120p. Multnomah Publishers. Illustrated with children’s art, this tender book gives helpful advice for helping children with major hurts. Subjects covered include: Death, Sexual Abuse, Divorce, Inferiority, Alcohol, Child with Cancer, Adoption, AIDS, Foster Care and Grandparent Senility.

Making the House a Home. Edgar Guest. 1922. Reilly & Lee. Very short essay-autobiography detailing births of children and deaths and adopting of a child. Along the way the Guests move to a larger home to accomodate their children.

Maternal Instinct, The: A Book for Every Woman Who Wants a Child. (UK). Susan Hampshire. 1984.

Life in Pieces, A: The Making & Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. Blake Eskin. 2003. 256p. WW Norton & Co. From Publishers Weekly: When Binjamin Wilkomirski published his childhood Holocaust memoir, Fragments, in 1996, it was met with both popular and critical praise. Soon, however, people began to voice concern over its authenticity, which ended in a full-fledged debunking on 60 Minutes in 1999. While much has been written about Wilkomirski, this stunning analysis by journalist Eskin is not only the best and most compelling account of the case, but places it in a broader social, political and cultural context that raises vital issues about history, identity, as well as personal and political responsibility. While the frame of the book is a fascinating personal memoir/journalistic investigation (Eskin’s family, immigrant Jews from Latvia, contact Wilkomirski thinking they might be related to him), the power of the work comes from the author’s ability to marshal the central arguments over Wilkomirski’s life and work in order to illuminate the more important and interesting question of how humans deal with trauma. Moving from the specific, Eskin touches on such broader and controversial topics as what happens when Holocaust memoirs are exposed as fiction, thus giving fuel to Holocaust deniers; how Wilkomirski’s book helped assuage Swiss guilt over Switzerland’s actions during WWII; how Holocaust literature has become emblematic of human suffering, allowing even non-Holocaust survivors to identify with and take on the metaphors of "the survivor." This is brought home in Eskin’s discussion of Lauren Grabowski, a Christian woman posing as a Jewish survivor who, under the name of Lauren Stratford, wrote an enormously popular, and discredited, memoir of child sexual abuse, Satan’s Underground. A mixture of thrilling detective work and astute cultural criticism, this is an important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as to studies of psychological and cultural trauma. © 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Life Worth Living, A. Nick Rogen. 2009. 220p. iUniverse, Inc. Can a baby who’s been forsaken half a world away save a wayward teen from self-destruction? Nick Rogen is your average small-town teenager until his mother’s bipolar disorder interrupts his youth and forces him into a world full of suicide attempts, doctors, and memory-erasing electroshock treatments. When a battle with substance abuse leads him to a dead-end job twisting off bottle caps from expired soda bottles, he gives up on his childhood dream of becoming a writer. He tries everything from backpacking around Europe to winning a fridge on The Price is Right to help find meaning in his crumbling life. It isn’t until his family drags him across the world to China that he begins to find hope and the inspiration to clean up his life through their adoption of an abandoned Chinese girl. Life isn’t always fair though, and an unexpected death back home challenges him to finally face the life he’s been trying to leave behind. About the Author: Nick Rogen likes to write. He’s a brother, a friend, a student, a dreamer, and a writer who lives in the State of Washington. A Life Worth Living is his first book.

Little Immigrants, The: The Orphans Who Came to Canada. Kenneth Bagnell. 1980. 271p. Macmillan of Canada (Canada). The Little Immigrants is a tale of compassion and courage and a vivid account of a deep and moving part of Canadian heritage. In the early years after Confederation, the rising nation needed workers that could take advantage of the abundant resources. Until the time of the Depression, 100,000 impoverished children from the British Isles were sent overseas by well-meaning philanthropists to solve the colony’s farm-labour shortage. They were known as the “home children,” and they were lonely and frightened youngsters to whom a new life in Canada meant only hardship and abuse. This is an extraordinary but almost forgotten odyssey that the Calgary Herald has called, “One of the finest pieces of Canadian social history ever to be written.” About the Author: Kenneth Bagnell grew up in Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto in the sixties to pursue a career in journalism. He has worked with The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and has received various awards for magazine writing and editing. He is also a renowned public speaker.

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, & the Future. Amy Richards & Jennifer Baumgardner. 2000. 240p. Farrar Straus & Giroux. A powerful indictment from within of the current state of feminism, and a passionate call to arms. From Lilith Fair to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the WNBA—everywhere you look—girl culture is clearly ascendant. Young women live by feminism’s goals, yet feminism itself is undeniably at a crossroads; “girl power” feminists appear to be obsessed with personal empowerment at the expense of politics while political institutions such as Ms. and NOW are so battle weary they’ve lost their ability to speak to a new generation. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards show the snags in each feminist hub—from the dissolution of riot grrrls into the likes of the Spice Girls, to older women’s hawking of young girls’ imperiled self-esteem, to the hyped hatred of feminist thorns like Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf—and prove that these snags have not, in fact, torn feminism asunder. In an intelligent and incendiary argument, Baumgardner and Richards address issues instead of feelings and the political as well as the personal. They describe the seven deadly sins the media commits against feminism, provide keys to accessible and urgent activism, discuss why the ERA is still a relevant and crucial political goal, and spell out what a world with equality would look like. They apply Third Wave confidence to Second Wave consciousness, all the while maintaining that the answer to feminism’s problems is still feminism. About the Author: Jennifer Baumgardner is a former editor at Ms. and writes regularly for The Nation, Jane, Glamour, and Out. Amy Richards is a contributing editor at Ms. and heads the Third Wave, an activist group for young women.

Mayo Clinic Complete Book of Pregnancy & Baby’s First Year. Robert V. Johnson, ed. 1994. 750p. William Morrow & Co. Contents include: Planning to start a family, Your body during pregnancy, How you baby develops, Selecting an obstetrical caregiver, prenatal: you first visit, prenatal tests, nutrition, lifestyle, work, first trimester, second trimester, third trimester, expecting twins, triplets or more, pregnancy and ongoing medical conditions, stopping or delaying preterm birth, preparing for childbirth, labor, birth, complications of childbirth, cesarean birth, your baby’s first hours, if your baby arrives early, when a baby is born with problems, adoption, you physical and emotion health in the first year...and much, much more.

Meet Yourself Again for the First Time: Hidden Forces Shape Our Lives. William Pillow. 2005. 180p. iUniverse, Inc. Do you think you really know yourself? You might be consciously aware of whom you think you are. But hidden forces recorded in your subconscious mind when you were a fetus or a young child can unconsciously and unintentionally shape your behavior and interpersonal relationships. In Meet Yourself Again for the First Time, author William Pillow shows how these forces can have a profound impact on your life. Meet Yourself Again for the First Time provides a wealth of thought-provoking information about the intricacies of memory, brain plasticity, and early human experiences. It helps you understand:
   • The complexity of humans
   • The lifelong impact of events in your early years
   • The influence of a complicated, unpredictable society
   • The individual uniqueness of human beings
   • The special nature and incomparable capabilities of each human being
Based on years of research on various forms of memory, Meet Yourself Again for the First Time helps you learn why you behave as you do with the ultimate goal of discovering a personal path to a better life for you and your children. About the Author: William Pillow was educated as a pharmacist, served in the USAF Medical Service Corps, and worked for a Fortune 500 company for thirty-four years. He has written and edited textbooks, and written articles for professional journals and trade periodicals.

Mexicans: A Personal Portrait of a People. Patrick Oster. 1989. 334p. William Morrow & Co. From Publishers Weekly: Former Mexico City bureau chief for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, Oster strings together breezy stories of 20 Mexicans—a cross-section of society—to illustrate the complexities of Mexico today. From Agustin, an honest cop, we learn that many Mexican police use torture as their number-one crime-solving technique. From the tale of Julio Scherer Garcia, a leading newspaper editor, we learn how kidnapping and intimidating phone calls stifle freedom of the press. Moving from Mexico City discos to remote Indian towns, we meet a doctor committed to helping poor patients despite his meager income, a struggling housemaid, a homosexual teacher wary of prejudice in a land of machismo, a TV comedian, a maverick politician, a herbal healer, environmentalists battling scavengers who live off a garbage dump. Oster, whose legally adopted son is a native Mexican, explains that illegal adoption is the norm, with bribery to grease the system’s wheels. This revealing report points up many endemic or hidden problems in modern Mexico. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction. Diane E Eyer. 1993. 237p. Yale University Press. Two decades ago two pediatricians published a series of articles and books arguing that mothers and their infants must be physically close immediately after birth in order for their future relationship to develop properly. Their studies were inspired by research on animals—especially goats—showing that they reject their offspring if they have been separated even briefly right after birth. Some child care experts expanded on this idea and proclaimed that mother-infant bonding should be continued for the first year of a child’s life. In spite of the fact that the research findings on bonding have now been dismissed by most of the scientific community, women are still told that the need to bond is a reason not to go back to work after having a baby, social workers are taught that bonding is important in preventing child abuse, delinquency, and school problems, and nurses are instructed to guide new mothers through the process of bonding. Guilt abounds among women who are unable, for whatever reason—illness of mother or child, premature birth, adoption—to experience the required period of bonding with their babies. In this absorbing book, Diane E. Eyer traces the history of the bonding myth and explains its continuing popularity despite its demonstrated lack of validity. Most important, she shows how it reflects a disturbing tendency in our society to accept “scientific” research without question—and without awareness that it can be distorted by professional agendas and public demands.

Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, & Natural Selection. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. 1999. 752p. Pantheon. Mother Nature presents a radical new way of understanding how mothers act and why, and how this new understanding is changing the way scientists think about how evolution works. Drawing on anthropology, history, literature, developmental psychology, and animal behavior, Sarah Hrdy examines the distinct biological and genetic elements that constitute maternal instinct. She strips away the biases implicit in conventional stereotypes of female nature to give us very different and provocative perspectives on maternal ambivalence, the links between maternity and ambition, mother love and sexual love, and she explains why age-old tensions between the sexes persist and are being played out today in efforts to control women’s reproductive choices.

Mothers Are Always Special. CelestineSibley. Illustrated by Shelly Sachs. 1970. 62p. Doubleday. Mama Sarah was a foster mother to over 200 children. Grandma Aken, who lived to be one hundred, raised 17 of her own and 25 adopted children on Deer Island, off the Gulf Coast. Cora Purefoy sold her baby for 300 dollars and then fought to get it back, and Montell Purcell took the responsibility for her baby’s blindness—or death—into her own hands. ’I do not know what makes a woman a good mother ... the single gift they have in common is that they love.

Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children & Custody. Phyllis Chesler. 1986. 651p. McGraw-Hill. From Publishers Weekly: Believing that mothers and children have a natural and “ineffable” right to each other’s company, psychologist Chesler asserts that there is a double standard in our patriarchal society that governs the rights of women, children and child custody. In part because of the “fathers’ rights” movement, she charges, unfit fathers are now granted custody with increasing frequency. Chesler’s impressively annotated, broad-based study offers a historical review of custody practices and an analysis of what constitutes “fit” parents, which serves as background to individual cases of worthy mothers considered unfit because of careers, impoverishment, a voluntarily unwed state or other nonstandard ways of living. Chesler castigates the distinction made between male custodial “rights” and female custodial “obligations.” She notes that millions of fathers have obtained custody by kidnapping, are often violent, average five times more income than mothers yet rarely pay child support. Joint custody should begin as joint parenting, affirms the author, in a deeply felt book that is sure to be controversial. © 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

My Portable Life: Reluctant Runaway Finds Families for Thousands of Children. Jean Nelson Erichsen. 2009. 372p. iUniverse, Inc. Sacred Heart, Minnesota, 1934: Born in the Great Depression to a sadly mismatched couple, a child is moved from one small town to another in her family’s quixotic search for affluence. She is neglected, abused, kept penniless in a middle-class family. She dreams of helping children find the stable family she is denied. Forced out of her home at sixteen, she’s a runaway, a child bride, a battered teenage mother. While she observes major events of the twentieth century, she wins her private struggle for independence. Through romance with a former World War II German soldier during the social revolution of the 1960s, to moving to Texas in the 1980s, Jean Erichsen becomes an innovator in international adoptions and a widely acclaimed and emulated agency director, social worker, and author. On an international journey spanning three decades, she and her husband raise children while traveling abroad and shaping ethical adoption practices for the benefit of thousands of orphans. About the Author: Jean Nelson Erichsen, MA, LBSW, earned a BS in communications/social work from Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Master’s in human development specializing in foreign adoption sources and procedures from St. Mary’s College, Winona, Minnesota. She and her husband, Heino, launched Los Niños International Adoption Center (LNI); they live in The Woodlands, TX.
Seelcted Books by Jean Nelson-Erichson:
Butterflies in the Wind: Spanish/Indian Children with White Parents (1992)
How to Adopt Internationally: A Guide for Agency-Directed and Independent Adoptions (2003)
Inside the Adoption Agency: Understanding Intercountry Adoption in the Era of the Hague Convention (2007)

Nation Builders: Barnardo Children in Canada. Gail H Corbett. 2002. 136p. Dundurn Press. This book unmasks one of the greatest human interest stories in Canadian history: the emigration of tens of thousands of children from Britain, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, to become “home children” in Canada. Through first-hand accounts and archived materials, Corbett sensitively and accurately records the pilgrimage of the children who, against great odds, proved that Canada was the promised land. Today Barnardo Children and their descendants are legion, and they are counted among Canada’s greatest nation builders. Reprint of the original book, published by Woodland Publishers, as Barnardo Children in Canada in 1981, with illustrations by W.H. Chapman. About the Author: Gail Helena Corbett was born in Peterborough, Ontario and is a graduate of Queen’s University. She is a teacher, has published in various periodicals, and is the editor of Famous Canadian Artists and the highly successful anthology, Portraits.

Natural History of Parenting, A: From Emperor Penguins to Reluctant Ewes, a Naturalist Looks at Parenting in the Animal World & Ours. Susan Allport. 1997. 238p. Harmony Books. Susan Allport, a science writer, mother, and part-time sheep farmer, first started wondering about the mysterious quality known as maternal instinct when one of her ewes rejected both motherhood and a perfectly healthy lamb for no discernable reason. The result of Allport’s curiosity is A Natural History of Parenting, a charming and informative exploration of how living things raise their young. Bears, birds, wolves, and penguins—they’re all here, along with harvest mice, house finches, squirrel monkeys and myriad other species. Topics include the differences in parenting techniques between mammals whose progeny are born ready to function almost immediately (sheep, for example) and those whose offspring require time to mature (kittens, puppies, human babies) as well as the role of males in raising their young. Allport’s prose is lively and accessible, and she does a good job of organizing and explicating years of research on the complicated subject of animal and human behavior. Her discussion of recent theories about mother-child bonding and nursing are especially enlightening. A Natural History of Parenting is a fine example of science writing for the lay audience at its best—informative, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Nature & Nurture During Middle Childhood. John C. Defries, et al. 1994. Blackwell Pub.

Nature’s Mind: The Impact of Darwinian Selection on Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language & Intelligence. Michael Gazzangia. 240p. Basic Bks. Theory describes how selection theory has revolutionized human understanding of biology, showing how natural selection affects everything from clinical depression to substance abuse.

Nature’s Thumbprint: The New Genetics of Personality. Peter B Neubauer & Alexander Neubauer. 1990. 223p. Addison-Wesley. In Nature’s Thumbprint, one of the country’s foremost psychiatrists and his son, a writer, explore the impact of today’s new genetic research on our understanding of human development and personality. Using original case studies of identical twins adopted in infancy and reared apart, this extraordinary book untangles the complex interaction between genetics and experience. COMPILER’S NOTE: This book appears to have been known as Nature’s Thumbprint: The Role of Genetics in Human Development.

No Time to Wave Goodbye. Ben Wicks. With an Introduction by one-time evacuee Michael Caine. 1988. 228p. Bloomsbury (UK). Ben Wicks, one of Canada’s best cartoonists and writers, goes back to his childhood in Britain in the early beginnings of WWII in 1939. This was when the children were to become wartime evacuees—often separated from their families and sometimes consigned to the five countries spread all over the world willing to take them. It is Ben Wicks’ story and the stories of the many of his fellow child wartime evacuees of Britain. “...[T]hree and a half million British civilians—mostly children—were moved from their urban homes to foster homes in areas thought to be safe from the threat of German bombs ... a personal and historical documentary of this astounding wartime experiment.” [Pictured: Cover of Canadian edition]

Not What I Expected: The Unpredictable Road from Womanhood to Motherhood: Fiction, Essays, Poetry, & Art. Donya Currie Arias & Hildie S Block, eds. 2007. 363p. Paycock Press. An anthology of poetry, fiction, essays and artwork by Jody Bolz, Carole Burns, Grace Cavalieri, Christina Daub, Mary Doroshenk, Patricia Gray, Clarinda Harriss, Anne Hasselbrack, Jacqueline Jules, Mary Ann Larkin, Lyn Lifshin, Hilary Tham, Donna Vitucci, Mary-Sherman Willis, and tons more. Includes a section on infertility, as well as one essay each from the perscpedtive of a prospective adoptive mother (“Purple Fleece and Motherhood” by Katherine Mikkelson) and a birth mother (“Holy Places” by Stephanie Brown).

Nurture Assumption, The: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Judith Rich Harris. 1998. 480p. (2009. 448p. 2nd, Revised and Updated Edition). The Free Press. Whether it’s musical talent, criminal tendencies, or fashion sense, we humans want to know why we have it or why we don’t. What makes us the way we are? Maybe it’s in our genes, maybe it’s how we were raised, maybe it’s a little of both—in any case, Mom and Dad usually receive both the credit and the blame. But not so fast, says developmental psychology writer Judith Rich Harris. While it has been shown that genetics is only partly responsible for behavior, it is also true, Harris asserts, that parents play a very minor role in mental and emotional development. The Nurture Assumption explores the mountain of evidence pointing away from parents and toward peer groups as the strongest environmental influence on personality development. Rather than leaping into the nature-vs.-nurture fray, Harris instead posits nurture (parental) vs. nurture (peer group), and in her view your kid’s friends win, hands down. This idea, difficult as it may be to accept, is supported by the countless studies Harris cites in her breezy, charming prose. She is upset about the blame laid on parents of troubled children and has much to say (mostly negative) about “professional parental advice-givers.” Her own advice may be summarized as “guide your child’s peer-group choices wisely,” but the aim of the book is less to offer guidance than to tear off cultural blinders. Harris’s ideas are so thought-provoking, challenging, and potentially controversial that anyone concerned with parenting issues will find The Nurture Assumption refreshing, important, and possibly life-changing. — Rob Lightner, Amazon.com.

On Being a Friend. Eugene Kennedy. 1982. 155p. Continuum.

Once Upon a Christmas: A Collection by Pearl Buck. Pearl S Buck. Illustrated by Donald Lizzul. 1972. John Day.

Once Upon the Future: A Woman’s Guide to Tomorrow’s Technology. Jan Zimmerman. 1986. 230p. Pandora Press.

One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk about Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Polyamory, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, & Other Realities of Truly Modern Love. Rebecca Walker, ed. 2009. 288p. Riverhead Hardcover. Edited by bestselling writer Rebecca Walker, this fascinating exploration of today’s American family features essays by prominent voices such as Z.Z. Packer, Dan Savage, Min Jin Lee, Asha Bandele, Neal Pollack, and others, on subjects such as: Open marriage • Gay Marriage • Green-card marriage • Interclass Marriage • Prison marriage • Househusbands • Open adoption • Transracial adoption • Sperm donation • Single motherhood • Polyamory • Living with in-laws • Parenting a disabled child • Bisexual marriage • Divorce Blended Families • Bicultural families • Relationships with child-care providers • Multiracial families • Home schooling • Equal parenting • Expatriate families. An unabashed celebration of love in all its diversity and complexity, One Big Happy Family is destined to become a definitive text on the modern American family. About the Editor: Rebecca Walker has received numerous awards and accolades for her writing. She is the author of the bestselling memoir Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of the Shifting Self and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, and the editor of the anthologies To Be Real and What Makes a Man.

One Witness. Aggie Hurst. Illustrated by Doug Brendel. 1986. 160p. FH Revell Co.

Orphans: Real & Imaginary. Eileen Simpson. 1987. 259p. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. At once a personal memoir and an essay on cultural history, Ms. Simpson combines her recollections of growing up as an orphan (she lost her mother at 11 months and father at 7 years of age) with a series of perceptive essays abut the nature of orphanhood in reality and fiction. Ms. Simpson, the author of Late Love: A Celebration of Marriage After Fifty , is a practising psychotherapist in New York City.

Parental Loss of a Child. Therese Rando, ed. 1986. 570p. Research Press. This comprehensive book is designed to help all caregivers understand and address the difficulties and complex issues associated with the loss of a child. It contains 37 chapters that identify specific clinical interventions and support procedures that are appropriate for helping bereaved parents. In Section 3, “Socially Unacknowledged Parental Bereavements,” Chapter 15 is entitled, “Solomon’s Mothers: Mourning in Mothers Who Relinquish Their Children for Adoption,” by Samuel Roll, Leverett Millen, and Barbara Blacklund. Concerned United Birthparents also contributed a Chapter under Section 6, “Organizations.”

Parenthood: Its Psychology & Psychopathology. EJ Anthony & Therese Benedek, eds. 1970. 650p. Little Brown. This is the definitive text on parenthood. Changing the way mental health professionals and educators view the life cycle, it established parenthood as a distinct stage of development with unique potentials and challenges.

Parenthood by Proxy: Don’t Have Them If You Won’t Raise Them. Dr. Laura Schlessinger. 2000. 288p. Cliff Street Books. From Library Journal Sociologist and controversial radio talk show host “Dr. Laura” sends a clear message: parenting should be limited to traditional families of two [heterosexual] parents, one of whom stays home with the children. Divorced or single people, homosexuals, and couples who both work should not have children; those who do are self-centered and contribute to the moral decline of society. Daycare users and providers, psychologists, abortion rights supporters, fertility specialists, and the American Library Association are just a few other targets of Dr. Laura’s anger (and her epilogue informs readers that her book is indeed written out of anger toward those who disagree with her). While many public libraries will want to buy this book to provide a different viewpoint and because Dr. Laura is well known, this reviewer does not think that Parenthood by Proxy has any place in any caring and considerate dialog on child rearing. Such a book promotes a climate of intolerance and hate. To belittle and negate the efforts of many caring parents from a wide variety of lifestyles who are raising moral, happy, and achieving children does not contribute to our understanding of parenthood. Not recommended. — Kay Brodie, Chesapeake Coll., Wye Mills, MD; © 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Parenting Through Crisis: Helping Kids in Times of Loss, Grief & Change. Barbara Coloroso. 2000. 271p. Penguin Books (Canada). Barbara Coloroso gives practical answers to difficult questions and illustrates her messages with anecdotes and humour. With chapters on the special challenges of adoption, single parent homes and stepfamilies, as well as extended discussions on handling the consequences of mischief and mayhem, ’Parenting through Crisis’ provides useful approaches to life’s most daunting situations.

Parenting With Love & Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility. Foster Cline, M.D. & Jim Fay. 1990. 229p. Navpress. This well-known child psychiatrist has written a book to help parents raise kids who are self-confident, motivated, and ready for the world by teaching them responsibility and the logic of life by giving them the opportunity to solve their own problems from the earliest possible age.

Parents’ Guide to Teenage Sex and Pregnancy, The. Howard R & Martha E Lewis. 1980. 351p. St Martin’s Press.

Parents’ Guide to Teenagers, The. Leonard H Gross, ed. 1981. 385p. Macmillan.

Perchan’s Chorea: Eros & Exile. Robert J Perchan. 1991. 147p. Watermark Press. From Kirkus Reviews: A happy surprise, this little elegant book about venery and scrutability and foreignness and style. Perchan, Cleveland-raised, teaches college in Korea, and his base of operations feeds his predilection for aphoristic, Latinate, dying-fall prose. Whether it’s the deadpan reprinting of letters to the Korea Herald (proof that cultures themselves get all tangled up in their own expectations of tradition and change), or semi-scientific classifications of Korean female pubic-hair patterns, or hilarious dialogues between the author-persona and his hardly respectable girlfriends, Perchan trains on whatever’s Korean a gimlet-eye and sad amusement; the poise of the style and the epigrammatic posture bring a less dour Edward Dahlberg, or Cyril Connolly, or even Catullus, to mind. “The Korean Government is threatening harsh measures in a crackdown on alcohol-related births. The republic, in fact, leads the world in the export of babies for adoption. Like storks, young world-travelers with empty pockets can hitch a free flight stateside by accompanying an orphan to its new home across the water. As a thrilled childless couple waits expectantly at the LAX arrival gate, Korean Air Flight 006 touches on the runway, its huge pneumatic tires smoking and hissing that first passionate, drunken kiss now very far away.” A lovely book. — ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Personal Problem Solver, The. Charles H Zastrow & Dae H Chang, eds. 1977. 383p. Prentice-Hall. A self-help handbook that offers a number of realistic and valid courses of action to help someone find relief when confronted by personal or emotional difficulites (suicide, rape, loneliness, bankrupcy, sex life, death, racial discrimination, drugs, love, adoption, homosexuality, smoking, self-assertion, communication, self-control, etc.).

Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade & the Spoils of History. David Lowenthal. 1996. 338p. Free Press. A keenly observant, if at times pretentious, exploration of identity politics writ large at the national level. What Lowenthal (Geography/University College, London) calls “the cult of heritage” is seen today in historical theme parks; museum and commemorative policy; child adoption; a booming illicit trade in art and antiquities; and most ominously, in xenophobia, racism, and genocide. Frequently heritage involves a national or ethnic trauma that needs to be recalled, such as the Holocaust for the Jews, the Potato Famine for the Irish, and the wars that kept Poland subjugated for years. At times, however, this emphasis sparks a kind of victim politics that brooks no disagreements and can even lead to a cycle of mutual grievances and bloodshed, as in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and the Middle East. Unlike history, Lowenthal notes, heritage makes no attempt at objectivity as it views the past with present-minded purpose. Heritage further deforms the past because it is “popularized, commoditized and politicized,”’ in the form of kitschy theme parks like Disney’s aborted Historyland and the more ambitious if still somewhat misleading Williamsburg (where management is still uncertain how fully to depict slavery in this colonial capital). Lowenthal is especially canny about heritage as an all-consuming growth industry, noting that Stonehenge is now protected from predatory tourists by barbed wire. However, he has caught more than the net of his argument can reasonably hold (it’s a wide range from essentially liberal curatorial issues to the horrors of genocide), and his prose aims for high-flown rhetoric when a little earthiness might have been helpful. Moreover, he never really shows the reader how to separate the wheat of heritage (its function as “creative act”) from the chaff (the many faults he describes). Still, a provocative examination of how nations worship at, and are sometimes sacrificed on, the altar of memory. — From Kirkus Reviews; ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Preserving Family Memories: A Guide to Creating Oral Histories. Marc A Seligman. 1997. 32p. Tapestry Books. How will you answer the questions that your child will ask about the circumstances of his or her adoption? Your child will want to know how you felt about the adoption. Why did you want a child? What were your hopes and dreams? Have they been realized? What about the thoughts of others who were involved with the adoption, such as the birthparents? The best way to answer those questions is to give the precious gift of recorded memories to your child. Let him or her see and hear your words, not as they have been filtered over time, but as they were spoken when he or she was just a dream about to come true. The only way that this can be done is to plan now. Preserving Family Memories gives you the information you need to create a videotape (or audiotape) that you and your child will always cherish. This book gives practical, no-nonsense advice about how to conduct interviews that will stand the test of time.

Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Viviana A Zelizer. 1985. 277p. Basic Books. In this landmark book, sociologist Viviana Zelizer traces the emergence of the modern child, at once economically “useless” and emotionally “priceless,” from the late 1800s to the 1930s. Having established laws removing many children from the marketplace, turn-of-the-century America was discovering new, sentimental criteria to determine a child’s monetary worth. The heightened emotional status of children resulted, for example, in the legal justification of children’s life insurance policies and in large damages awarded by courts to their parents in the event of death. A vivid account of changing attitudes toward children, this book dramatically illustrates the limits of economic views of life that ignore the pervasive role of social, cultural, emotional, and moral factors in our marketplace world.

Raising a Sensory Smart Child: The Definitive Handbook for Helping Your Child with Sensory Integration Issues. Lindsey Biel, MA, OTR/L & Nancy Peske. Foreword by Temple Grandin. 2005. 416p. Penguin. For children with sensory integration issues—those who have difficulty processing everyday sensations and exhibit unusual behaviors such as avoiding or seeking out touch, movement, sounds, and sights—this groundbreaking book is an invaluable resource. Long thought to affect only autistic children, or mistaken for ADHD, SI dysfunction is finally being recognized as a separate condition. Coauthored by a pediatric occupational therapist and a parent of a child with SI dysfunction, Raising a Sensory Smart Child is as warm and accessible as it is authoritative and detailed and is an indispensable guide for parents, therapists, and teachers who will turn to it again and again. About the Author: Lindsey Biel, M.A., OTR/L, is an occupational therapist specializing in pediatrics. Nancy Peske is the coauthor of the Cinematherapy series. She lives in New York City with her husband and son, who was diagnosed with sensory issues when he was two.

Reader’s Guide to Books on Post-Adoption Issues. Michelle Carlini. 1984. Morning Side (Canada). A comprehensive bibliography that deals with all aspects of adoption and all members of the adoption triad. This book must be directly ordered from Morning Side Publishing, P.O. Box 21071, Saanichton, R.P.O. Saanichton, B.C., V8M 2C3, Canada. The Phone number listed is 250-652-3284. Be aware that this information may change in the future.

Remembering & Forgetting: A Inquiry into the Nature of Memory. Edmund Blair Bolles. 1988. 315p. Walker & Co.

Representing Yourself: What You Can Do Without a Lawyer. Kenneth Lasson & Public Citizen Litigation Group. Introduction by Ralph Nader. 1983. 270p. Farrar Straus & Giroux; 2nd Rev Ed. 1995. Plume Books. Uniquely practical, this guide is the consumer’s answer to questions about law from the commonplace to the complex. Each chapter addresses a different subject, such as landlord-tenant relations and buying and selling a house, and the book includes helpful appendices and sample legal forms.

Rest of Us, The: Dispatches from the Mother Ship. Jacqueline Mitchard. 1997. 255p. Viking Productions. A beguiling collection of sometimes insightful, often amusing columns from a mother of five who is also a widow, a bestselling author, and not Erma Bombeck. There is no question that the late Bombeck is missed for her heartfelt and pungent commentaries. But the void that she has left does not have to be filled by an Erma manque. Mitchard, author of the novel that Oprah turned into a bestseller, The Deep End of the Ocean (1996), is of another generation and another lifestyle, the now-single mother, one of whose children was adopted after her husband died. Her syndicated newspaper column is in some ways the shallow end of her ocean, although it deals with concerns that she will undoubtedly address in greater depth in future novels. The author proclaims that she and her audience are all those women who are not Martha Stewart, not the girlfriend who was both calculus prodigy and cheerleader, but “the rest of us.” The column, she says, has been her anchor, the quasi-diary in which she begins to confront the questions of, for instance, death and adoption, both for herself and her children. But she also reflects on—and occasionally skewers— such concerns as women’s magazines that herald make-work crafts (elves from detergent bottles) versus men’s magazines that deal with really useful stuff (building shelves, repairing light fixtures), being expelled from the car pool, and meeting the mother of the baby you are about to adopt. Some of her reflections are funny, some aim for the jugular, some are genuinely moving, like those on life as a widow. Cherry-picked from newspaper columns, this collection is necessarily formulaic in style and uneven in content. Read it, nevertheless: It’s written by a woman who dredges for what matters. — From Kirkus Reviews. Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Richard Simmons’ Never Give Up: Inspiration, Reflections, Stories of Hope. Richard Simmons. 1993. 342p. Warner Books. With characteristic enthusiasm and humor, TV fitness personality Simmons encourages would-be weight-losers with 40 inspirational stories. Among them are recollections of Diane, who began overeating after she gave up her baby for adoption.

Searching for Home: Three Families from the Orphan Train, a True Story. Martha & Christina Vogt. 1979. 240p. Triumph Press.

Secret Life of Families, The: Truth-Telling, Privacy, and Reconciliation in a Tell-All Society. Evan Imber-Black. 1998. 315p. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishers. When do I have the right to keep a secret? Who has a responsibility to open a secret? How do I know the time is right to maintain a secret or to open it? How do I make it safe for myself and others? What are my obligations to the people I love where secrets are concerned? An HIV-positive man fears losing his job if his health status becomes known. ... A wife keeps a secret bank account. ... A husband has an affair. ... A teen refuses to say where she goes at night. ... Secrets come in all shapes and sizes. And for families as well as individuals, they are built on a complex web of shifting motives and emotions. But today, when personal revelations are posted on the Internet or sensationalized on afternoon talk shows, we risk losing touch with how important secrets are—how they are used and abused, their power to harm and to heal. In fact, what we choose to share or to keep silent about can affect, for better or worse, our health, our work, our relationships, our future. Evan Imber-Black eloquently and compassionately describes how to maintain a balance between candor and caution to ensure that secrets remain a creative rather than a destructive force in our lives. She helps us understand: the distinction between healthy privacy and toxic secrecy; what to tell—and not to tell—young children; how to safely confront a family “zone of silence”; why adolescents need to have some secrets—and where to draw the line; The role of gender, race, religion, and class in shaping our secrets; the effect of “official” secrets, like sealed adoption records and medical testing; what to consider before revealing an important secret; and much more. Filled with moving first-person stories, The Secret Life of Families provides perspective on some of today’s most sensitive personal and social issues. It is a book that gives voice to our deepest fears and to our power to overcome them—a book that will be talked about for years to come.

Secret Life of the Unborn Child, The. Thomas Verny, MD, with John Kelly. 1981. 253p. Summit Books. The Secret Life of the Unborn Child challenges everything we know—or think we know—about the intellectual and emotional development of the unborn and newly born child, providing substantiation of the instinctive knowledge of most mothers: that happy mothers make happy babies. It also presents compelling evidence that our personalities and psychological predispositions can be shaped, at least in part, before birth.

Severe Attachment Disorder in Childhood: A Guide to Practical Therapy. Niels P Rygaard. 2006. 213p. Springer. Today, the important early bond between mother and baby is under stress. Three to five percent of all children show signs of severe attachment problems, often leading to social problems and violent/criminal behavior/abuse later in life. Based on his more than 20 years of theory and personal practice in the field of attachment disorder, Dr. Rygaard’s handbook of therapy provides the reader with a theoretical understanding as well as a wealth of suggestions for daily practice. Step by step, the reader is guided through a cross-scientific theoretical overview, the classic symptoms of disturbed attachment, and treatment at different stages of development, from preventive measures to ensure a healthy attachment early in life to treatment at different stages of personality development to adulthood. For each step, many examples from daily practice as well as checklists at different stages are given. Special sections on adoption issues, how to teach the AD schoolchild, sexual abuse and AD give tools and inspiration for the reader’s design. The final chapters concern the personal development of the therapist as well as suggestions for designing the therapeutic milieu and teamwork. The book is equally useful to the professional practitioner as well as the adoptive parent or foster family. About the Author: Niels Peter Rygaard is a Clinical Psychologist, specialist approved by DPA (the Danish Psychologist Association), Private practitioner, m.o. The International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ISSPD)

Somebody Else’s Kids. Torey L Hayden. 1981. 333p. Putnam Publishing Group. A small seven-year-old boy who couldn’t speak except to repeat weather forecasts and other people’s words; a beautiful little girl of seven who had been brain damaged by terrible parental beatings and was so ashamed because she couldn’t learn to read; a violently angry ten-year-old who had seen his stepmother murder his father and had been sent from one foster home to another; a shy twelve-year-old from a Catholic school which put her out when she became pregnant. They were four problem children—put in Torey Hayden’s class because no one else knew what to do with them. Together, with the help of a remarkable teacher who cared too much to ever give up, they became almost a family, able to give each other the love and understanding they had found nowhere else. About the Author: Torey Hayden is an educational psychologist and a former special education teacher who, since 1979, has chronicled her struggles in the classroom in a succession of bestselling books. She currently lives and writes in North Wales, U.K., with her husband and daughter.

Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Guide. Rita Mae Brown. 1988. 254p. Bantam.From the outspoken and irreverent multi-million-copy bestselling author, here is the first trade paperpack publication of Brown’s writing manual. Unlike most writers’ guides, hers has as much to do with how writers live as with mastering the tools of their trade. [Includes reminiscences by the author about being adopted].

Stories of Fairies, Elves & Little People. Francine L Trevens. Illustrated by Jesse Zerner. 1979. 127p. Playmore Inc Publishers. Eddie the elf finds a new friend in a little blind girl ... a storm destroys the home of the Spry family of fairies ... a little pixie princess is adopted by a family of leprechauns ... a boy fairy starts on a trip to space and winds up trapped in the hands of an evil dodo bird ... a mischievous pixie makes a boy late for school, then visits him again years later ... a friendly gnome befriends a tiny injured bird and finds himself in trouble because of it... . These and many other stories about fairies, elves, and little people are included in this delightful book.

Talking with Your Teenager: A Book for Parents. Ruth Bell &s Leni Zeiger Wildflower. 1983. 127p. Random House.

This Must Be My Brother. Leann Thieman & Carol Dey. 1995. 173p. Victor Books/SP Publications. From Publishers Weekly: Two housewives who had never been out of Iowa, Thieman and Dey were officers in the Iowa chapter of Friends of Children of Vietnam (an organization that, during the Vietnam War, raised money and supplies for Vietnamese orphans and also processed adoptions). In early April 1975, they were asked to fly into Vietnam and bring back six babies for adoption. As the fall of Saigon became imminent, however, President Ford approved a massive baby lift, and the six babies became two hundred. Thieman and Dey share their adventure-the doubts, terror, humor and the people they met on their mission. (The authors have even tracked down many of those same people 20 years later and have added their stories in an epilogue.) This is an astonishing story told honestly, without ego. It is also one that should not have had to wait 20 years for its telling. Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Thorn of Lion City, The: A Memoir. Lucy Lum. 2007. 231p. PublicAffairs Books. From Kirkus Reviews: In her serenely composed debut memoir, native daughter Lum provides a rare, compelling glimpse of Singapore during WWII. Her father came to “the Lion City” in 1919, when his widowed mother decided to leave the island of Hainan and educate her four-year-old son to become an interpreter. She died shortly after he married at age 16, and the young couple was forced to move in with the bride’s mother, Popo. A disapproving old dictator, trained in herbal medicine and steeped in ancient superstition, she ruled the household; it was Popo who named the author Miew-yong (Subtle Lotus) upon her birth in 1933. As Father’s salary improved, the family steadily moved to nicer neighborhoods. His growing prosperity enabled Popo to marry off her unlovely second daughter to a government employee and to purchase—and roundly abuse—several muichai, girls sold into servitude by their families. Meanwhile, Lum’s mother embarked on a life of leisure and neglect of her girls; one daughter died of abuse, another was given up for adoption. Miew-yong became keenly aware of the ruling matriarchs’ double standard: She and her sisters were relentlessly blamed and beaten, while their two brothers were indulged. British colonial rule collapsed with the 1942 invasion of the Japanese, who oppressed and tortured Singapore’s various ethnic groups over the next three-and-a-half years. Father’s work as a translator largely spared the family from starvation, but the humiliation heaped on him by his mother-in-law and wife drove him to drink; he died at the end of the war. When Mother entered into a liaison with a married man who persuaded her to make disastrous financial decisions, it was hardworking Miew-yong and her sister who (barely) held the family together. Now living in London, Lum subtly champions the will of a young girl who refused to be silenced. A riveting narrative of little-known Chinese history. About the Author: Lucy Lum grew up in Singapore and moved to England in 1970. She lives in London.

To Love a Child. Nancy Reagan, with Jane Wilkie. 1982. 229p. Bobbs-Merrill. The Foster Grandparent Program, which Mrs. Reagan calls “My baby,” is a program in which the caring love of the old for the young gives new life to both. Nancy Reagan’s own deep interest in foster grandparenting began in 1967, when a routine hospital visit as the California governor’s wife introduced her to foster grandchildren who tugged at her hand—and never let go of her heart. Includes interviews with Foster Grandparents.

To Prison With Love: The True Story of Sandy Musser’s Indecent Indictment & America’s Adoption Travesty. Sandy Musser. Terri Pesatrice, ed. 1995. 276p. Adoption Awareness Press. Sandy Musser was sent to federal prison for her work reuniting families who had been separated by adoption, foster care and divorce. You will be moved by this true story of a woman who had lost and then found her own child, and wanted nothing more than to reunite others. Her story was featured on 60 minutes, Dateline, and A&E.

Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture. Linda L Layne, ed. 1999. 240p. New York University Press. Foreword / Rayna Rapp; Introduction: The Child as Gift: New Directions in the Study of Euro-American Gift Exchange / Linda L. Layne; Freely given: open adoption and the rhetoric of the gift / Judith S. Modell; The gift of life: surrogate motherhood, gamete donation, and constructions of altruism / Heléna Ragoné; Gifts and burdens: the social and familial context of foster mothering / Danielle F. Wozniak; Does God give special kids to special parents? personhood and the child with disabilities as gift and as giver / Gail Landsman; “True gifts from God”: motherhood, sacrifice, and enrichment in the case of pregnancy loss / Linda L. Layne.

Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are. Lawrence Wright. 1997. 208p. John Wiley & Sons. Wright, who wrote on twins for the New Yorker, presents more of his research for that article in a thought-provoking examination of twin studies and what we have learned from them. Separated-at-birth jokes are part of today’s pop culture, but really, much of what we know about genetics comes from studying identical and fraternal twins who were reared apart. Wright shows how, historically, different interpretations of these studies have ended up creating trends in psychology or fueling social policy, and that researchers are still tracing the heritability of such things as IQ, addictive and criminal behavior through siblings, fraternal twins, and identical twins in attempts to resolve the nature-versus-nurture debate. With plenty of amazing stories about the similarities and differences of twins, Wright respectfully shows, too, how their special circumstance in life challenges our notions of individuality. A truly fascinating but sometimes spooky (Mengele’s experiments with twins at Auschwitz figure among Wright’s examples) study. — Copyright © 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved

Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists, The: A Mind-Boggling Collection of Fun, Fascinating & Bizarre Facts on Movies, Music, Sports, Crime, Celebrities, History, Trivia & More. The Best of Listverse.com. 2009. 432p. Ulysses Press. Providing an astonishing array of information, The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists contains the best of everything from serial killers, scientific oddities, and historical events to little-known facts about everyone’s favorite celebrities, films, and books. There are even practical lists on how to save time and money and how to survive anything from a cocktail party to a bear attack. From the Oscars to Fantasy Football, everyone loves to debate rankings of the best and worst. For even those who think they know all the answers, there is an inherent curiosity to see what made the list. The Ultimate Book of Top Ten Lists is the perfect book to pass around to family and friends, who will no doubt debate what’s been included—and what’s been left out.
Relevant Sections Include:
Top 10 Bizaare Relationships: No. 10: Woody Allen & Soon-Yi Previn; and No. 4: Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski (siblings separated by the adoption of one [Patrick] who subsequently met, not knowing they were related, and married one another).
Top 10 Amazing Coincidences: No. 6: Twins [separated at birth: Jim Lewis and Jim Springer, exhibit many similarities despite having been raised apart].
Top 10 Extraordinary Twins: No.6: Separated at Birth Twins: Tamara Rabi and Adriana Scott (Born 1983); and No. 1: Experimental Twins, Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein (Born 1969).

Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home. Thomas A Bass. 1996. 278p. Soho Press. The Vietnamese called the Amerasian children of U.S. servicemen but doi, “the dust of life.” Half American and half Asian, they had been abandoned by their fathers to a xenophobic society that ostracized them. Nor was the U.S. government anxious to acknowledge their paternity and assume responsibility. With the passage of the Homecoming Act, however, the Congress finally, after many years, opened the door to their immigration. Any child who could demonstrate American parentage—if only by the simple evidence of Western features—would be welcome. Relatives too. By then the children’s average age was 19. The federal authorities settled the Amerasians in cities like Rochester and Utica, provided them with temporary housing in dilapidated asylums and meager vocational training in jobs like motel housekeeping. Ironically, a good many began their new lives accompanied by bogus relatives who had alleged kinship in order to escape their homeland, using the Amerasians like human tickets to America for their own families and themselves. Reunions with fathers were rare. The majority of young adults after a very few months were on their own again. Little had changed for them except that in America they were illiterate in two languages and knew virtually no one. The transition was not easy for any but if the Amerasian children are anything they are survivors, however damaged. About the Author: Thomas A. Bass authored The Eudaemonic Pie, Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World’s Leading Scientists and Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa. He has written for Wired, Smithsonian, Audubon, Pacific News Service, Omni, Discover and The New York Times.

Voices of Silence: Lives of the Trappists Today. Frank Bianco. 1991. 220p. Paragon House. A disaffected Catholic, photojournalist Bianco blamed God for his son’s 1984 death in a car accident. Lengthy stays at Trappist abbeys in the U.S. and France triggered painful memories of his son but taught the author to yield to God’s love and to accept loss. Although the monks become Bianco’s heros, he paints them in very human terms. Dom Stephen feels lonely as abbot, cut off from the informal give-and-take with his brothers that nourished his monastic existence. Brother Leo resents the Vatican II reforms that abolished his lay brother vocation. Critical of the abbey’s accessibility to Bianco as well as to women retreatants, Father Bede of Gethsemani in Kentucky was an abandoned child raised by excessively strict foster parents. While he was fighting in WW II, his fiancee died in childbirth and his son was put up for adoption. One day, a woman retreatant grieving for a father suffering from cancer turns out to be Father Bede’s granddaughter. Seekers of all faiths will be intrigued by and gain respect for the contemplative life as portrayed in these pages.

What Happened to Johnnie Jordan?: The Story of a Child Turning Violent. Jennifer Toth. 2002. 320p. Free Press. On an icy night five years ago, Johnnie Jordan—just fourteen years old—brutally murdered his elderly foster care mother, leaving the state of Ohio shocked and outraged. He could not tell police why he did it or even how it made him feel; all he knew was that something inside him made him kill. At the time, few people predicted the swift emergence of a class of young so-called “super-predators”—criminals like Johnnie who injure and kill without conscience, personified to the nation by the Littleton, Colorado, tragedy in 1999. In What Happened to Johnnie Jordan? acclaimed journalist Jennifer Toth, author of The Mole People and Orphans of the Living, once again takes a look at the people in our society whom we so often discard and altogether ignore. As Toth investigates Johnnie’s crime and life, she unravels the mysteries of a child murderer unable to identify his emotions even after they converge in acts of fury and rage. In the course of her research, Johnnie grows dangerously into a young man who “will probably kill again,” he says, “though I don’t want to.” Yet he also demonstrates great kindness and caring when treated as more than just a case number, when treated as a human. Through Johnnie’s harrowing story, Toth examines how some children manage to overcome tragic beginnings, while others turn their pain, anger, and loss on innocents. More than a beautifully written narrative of youth gone wrong, this is the story of a child welfare system so corrupted by bureaucracy and overwhelmed with cases that many children entrusted to its care receive none at all. It is also the story of a Midwestern town struggling with blame and anger, unable to reconcile the damage done by so young an offender. From Johnnie’s early years on the streets to his controversial trial and ultimate conviction, What Happened to Johnnie Jordan? is a seminal work on youth violence and how we as a society can work to curtail it. Ultimately, Toth ponders one of the most difficult and important questions on youth violence: If we can’t control the way children are raised, how can we prevent them from destroying other lives as well? About the Author: Jennifer Toth graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She has written pieces for the Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, and Business Week, and she is the author of The Mole People and Orphans of the Living. She lives in Maryland.

What to Expect the First Year. Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E Murkoff, & Sandy E. Hathaway, BSN. 1989. Workman Publishing Company. Is our baby eating enough? Is this much crying normal? How do I know when she is really sick? This hefty, 671-page guide to your baby’s first year is brought to you by the creators of the bestselling What to Expect When You’re Expecting. The three authors, all mothers themselves, are calm, clear, and encouraging as they tackle the first year of child-rearing, month by month. The easy-to-absorb, chronological format includes sections such as “What Your Baby May Be Doing,” “What You Can Expect at This Month’s Checkups,” “Feeding Your Baby This Month,“ “What You May Be Concerned About,” and “What It’s Important to Know.” Part Two addresses special concerns such as illness, first aid do’s and don’ts, the low-birthweight baby, the adopted baby, becoming a father, and sibling relationships. You’ll also find discussions of breastfeeding and bottlefeeding, selecting a physician for the baby, diapers and clothing, safety, and many ways of stimulating the baby’s development. The recipes for babies and toddlers in Part Three are useful, as are the recommended home remedies; charts on common childhood illnesses; height and weight; and the thorough index. (A particular strength of the book is the authors’ careful attention to diet and nutrition for both mother and baby, incorporating the American Academy of Pediatrics’ latest recommendations on infant nutrition.) While some of the authors’ perspectives are controversial (such as whether to let your baby “cry it out” or not), this book remains one of the most comprehensive resources for new parents as they toddle through their baby’s first year.

What’s Happening to Me?: The Answers to Some of the World’s Most Embarrassing Questions. Peter Mayle. 1975. Lyle Stuart. Where did I come from, why was I adopted, how to be a pregnant father?

Wilkomirski Affair, The: A Study in Biographical Truth. Stefan Maechler. Translated by John E Woods. 2001. 512p. Schocken. This is the definitive report on Fragments, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented “memoir” of a childhood spent in concentration camps, which created international turmoil. Originally published in German under the title Bruchstucke: Aus einer Kindheit 1939-1948, as a memoir by a Swiss musician named Binjamin Wilkomirski, it was initially hailed by critics, who compared it with the masterpieces of Primo Levi and Anne Frank. The book received major prizes and was translated into nine languages. The English-language edition was published by Schocken in 1996. In Fragments, Wilkomirski described in heartwrenching detail how as a small child he survived internment in Majdanek and Birkenau and was eventually smuggled into Switzerland at the war’s end. But three years after the book was first published, articles began to appear that questioned its authenticity and the author’s claim that he was a Holocaust survivor. Stefan Maechler, a Swiss historian and expert on anti-Semitism and Switzerland’s treatment of refugees during and after World War II, was commissioned on behalf of the publishers of Fragments to conduct a full investigation into Wilkomirski’s life. Maechler was given unrestricted access to hundreds of government and personal documents, interviewed eyewitnesses and family members in seven countries, and discovered facts that completely refute Wilkomirski’s book. The Maechler report has implications far beyond the tragic story of one individual’s deluded life. It explores our feelings about survivor literature and the impact these works can have on our remembrance of the Holocaust. The full text of both Fragments and Maechler’s report are contained in The Wilkomirski Affair. See also, A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski.

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths & Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Clarissa Pinkola Estes. 1992. 448p. Ballentine. The wild woman. She is the internal, eternal essence of the feminine: instinctive, intuitive, primitive, powerful. In this remarkable collection of multicultural myths and stories, a renowned Jungian analyst and storyteller reintroduces this important archetype into the lives of modern women.

Your Child’s Self-Esteem: The Key to His Life. Dorothy Briggs. 1970. 341p. Doubleday. Step-by step guidelines for raising responsible, productive, happy children. Self-image is your child’s most important characteristic. How to help create strong feelings of self-worth is the central challenge for every parent and teacher. The formula for how is spelled out in Your Child’s Self Esteem.