by Tina Cassidy
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| List Price: | $14.00 |
| Average Rating: |  |
| Lowest New Price: | $5.87 |
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Product Description
“Well-researched and engaging . . . Birth is a clever, almost irreverent look at an enduring everyday miracle. (A-)” —Entertainment Weekly
“Wonderful. Packed full of information, a brilliant mixture of ancient wisdom and modern science.” —Kate Mosse, author of the New York Times best seller, Labyrinth
“Birth is a power-packed book. . . . A lively, engaging, and often witty read, a quirky, eye-opening account of one of life’s most elemental experiences.” —The Boston Globe
Published to widespread acclaim, Tina Cassidy’s smart, engaging book is the first world history of childbirth in fifty years. From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we’re born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia but that’s about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth? Cassidy explores the physical, anthropological, political, and religious factors that have and will continue to influence how women bring new life into the world.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Required reading for new mothers, 2008-06-06
So many of my friends were pushed into birth experiences that were not what they expected by not knowing what to expect when you get to the hospital, and why things are the way they are right now in the US. The truth is that it IS possible to have a positive childbirth experience, you just have to work to get it. Don't expect the hospital or doctors to look out for you, as they are working for the benefit of the hospital and not you. Read this book, get informed, find out what you want, and find practitioners in your area that agree with you.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Read for entertainment, not information, 2008-05-17
After hearing the birth stories of her mother and grandmother and after her own emergency C-section, Tina Cassidy starts contemplating the history of childbearing methods, starting with why it's so much harder for us to bear children than for a rhesus monkey (biped and big brain). She then examines midwives, where we give birth, doctors, pain relief, C-sections, forceps and other tools, and the role of the father.
Some of this book is truely squirm-inducing. She describes the horrific ways women have been forced to give birth-whether that's quietly and all alone in a barn or being strapped to a table and given drugs to lead to amnesia. She details the evolution of C-section techniques. Perhaps most disurbingly, she describes each of the ways a stillborn (or a baby though to be stillborn or stuck in the birth canal) have been removed in hopes of saving the mother's life. However, the only section I had to just skip a page on was her description of how placentas have been served. Because she is a journalist, Cassidy does tend to harp on the sensational, the big stories, and the odd cases.
This is an entertaining read, but it should not be used as an authoritiative source on the history of childbirth-this is intended to be entertaining, not source material. She plays fast an loose with statistics to serve her needs-for instance, to prove her point about maternal death rates, she examines the records kept by a doctor in a town a couple hundred years ago and compares it to well-kept, maticulously documented government reports for entire countries. She also seems to equate the phrase "research shows" or "research suggests" with "the research I did on Lexus (or JSTOR or whatever) shows that someone wrote a newspaper about this-I have no idea what RESEARCHERS have found about this." The most infuriating case of this is her twice mentioned connection between Pitocin and autism. My son's birth was induced by Pitocin and he does have autism, so I was quickly drawn to this and immediatly checked her source to see how strong a correlation there was. Her source was a newspaper report. This is all the reporter says about it: "Over the years, a host of other environmental factors have also been nominated as culprits, including a variety of infections, like German measles in pregnant mothers; the sedative drug thalidomide; the drug Pitocin, used to induce labor; synthetic compounds like plastics and PCB's; and food additives." That's it. Nothing from the CDC, no reports cited, nothing. I bring up these two examples not to discourage people from reading this book; it's an interesting read. But don't believe everything you read in here. If something sounds too incredible to be true, it might be. Check it out for yourself. (But then, that's always good advice.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
This book is wonderful!, 2008-04-28
The beginning drew me in right away! Some of the facts that Tina Cassidy had discovered, I was surprised about!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
One of the best books written today on birth, 2008-03-27
If you are pregnant, were pregnant, want to be pregnant, will be pregnant or any combination of the above, read this book. It acurately highlights the problems with birth in the United States today, offering an historical, scientific, and sociological view. It is dense, but well-written, and you will be so enthralled by her words that you will finish it within a day.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
honest... brutal... heartbreaking, 2008-02-05
the injustices done to laboring mothers over the course of the doctor's evolution is spelled out in painfully plain text in "Birth: the surprising history of how we are born."
how have we gone from a midwife-gaurded, normal life event to a doctor-horded medical emergency? i found it interesting that, during the advent of hospital maternity wards, the rich & upper class continued to birth safely at home, while the poor & indigen were forced to endure medical experiments involving forceps, forced drugs, the humiliation of being strapped down & the horrifying "craniotomy" of their stuck babies.
an absolute must-read for anyone interested in learning how far we have come in our birthing practice. after reading "Birth", perhaps some will rethink their position on the "hippie homebirth movement".
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