Rating: 
Summary: Mothers Will Remember, Fathers Will At Last Understand
Review: The descriptions and analyses of her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood are gripping, yet hilarious and deeply touching, all within the context of a serious book. I could not put it down. Beautifully written. All expecting couples should read this book, and pass it on to their children when they eventually start a family..... .... .... .... .... .... Buy it at
Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk
Rating:
Summary: A Call to Arms
Review: This book is amazing, Ms Steingrabers style of writing - hard (and often frightening) facts interspersed with personal vignettes - makes it a pleasure to read. I couldn't put it down. As a childless woman I do wonder though, how a newly pregnant first time mother might react to such startling information; this is not a caution to avoid reading Ms Steingrabers book but rather a suggestion to read it well before conception or to allow time for the full impact of the book to be integrated (and perhaps the panic to recede). The truth would seem to be that there is no longer any clean air on this planet of ours and pollution of all kinds is a daily reality regardless of where in the world we live, breast fed human babies are at the top of the food chain therefore serious, long lasting action should be taken to protect our offspring from the concentrated amounts of toxins they can potentially receive inutero and postpartum - when you know what's going on, you can call for change. Happy reading.
Rating:
Summary: A Call to Arms
Review: This book is amazing, Ms Steingrabers style of writing - hard (and often frightening) facts interspersed with personal vignettes - makes it a pleasure to read. I couldn't put it down. As a childless woman I do wonder though, how a newly pregnant first time mother might react to such startling information; this is not a caution to avoid reading Ms Steingrabers book but rather a suggestion to read it well before conception or to allow time for the full impact of the book to be integrated (and perhaps the panic to recede). The truth would seem to be that there is no longer any clean air on this planet of ours and pollution of all kinds is a daily reality regardless of where in the world we live, breast fed human babies are at the top of the food chain therefore serious, long lasting action should be taken to protect our offspring from the concentrated amounts of toxins they can potentially receive inutero and postpartum - when you know what's going on, you can call for change. Happy reading.
Rating:
Summary: Should Be Required Reading
Review: This book should be required reading for every parent, nursing mother, pregnant woman, or women even thinking about conceiving. I highly recommend this book (the author is a scientist, great writer, and new mother) because it helps articulate a problem that desperately needs solving--how chemical pollution impacts our children in utero, and as sucklings. It is beautifully written, and an incredible testament to the sanctify and bond of the nursing mother and child. Rather than shy away from the dispairing fact that breastmilk is contaminating our children, I say, give me the facts (which this book does) and lets change this!! I wrote letters to my senators the morning after I finished this book (this morning). And here I am writing a review at Amazon. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: An insightful book on the environment and pregnancy
Review: This book was such a joy compared to all the clingy books that track the monthly progress of your pregnancy. Of course, those books fill their need, but I believe that all expectant mothers should read this. I was attracted to the book because I am environmentally-minded. I couldn't stop reading it because it was well-written, intelligent, and touching. There are only a few sections where the science is a little obtuse, but actually, most of the writing is so down-to-earth, that it is easy to forgive some of the "heavier" science. I had a few clues about some of the environmental dangers she writes about, but the book is so well-researched and so good at explaining the problems, that it was quite an education. A good book for ALL people to read, I believe.
Rating:
Summary: The top of the food chain
Review: You don't have to be pregnant to read this book. Steingraber is a poet and a scientist, sometimes both at once. From the very first paragraph of the preface, her poet's eye pulls us into the "ecosystem of the mother's body," and we share her amazement that she had "become a habitat. [Her] womb was an inland ocean with a population of one." Before she finishes, she has also realized that contrary to received opinion, "man" is not the top of the food chain: the nursing baby is! There are many more pithy and poetic observations, but I won't give any more of them away as they are a large part of the book's power to enchant.
The science, especially the toxicology, is perhaps a little detailed for the expectant mother to assimilate in one reading, but one can always go back and take up one topic at a time, as Steingraber does in the course of the monthly chronology she follows. The early passages on the formation of the fetus are wonderful. The story of which cells start where and the landmarks of their migrations reads like a travel narrative. But then abruptly, S leaves behind the high art of embryology and her pregnancy "becomes empirical." Her toothbrush feels too big for her mouth, she is cranky, the bread of her sandwich is the wrong kind, and it's cut wrong. After some personal perspective on morning sickness, she once again adopts her scientist's perspective to investigate the causes of this nearly universal experience and why there is so little expert knowledge about it. We have soon learned more than we have ever heard about it before. In similar manner, alternately technical and lyrical, she covers both the science and personal experience of amniocentesis, congenital defects, fetal growth, prenatal education, birthing, and nursing-through to weaning. One can always find sources for the facts presented as well as avenues to find out more in the footnotes at the end of the book. At whatever speed one reads it, the book's message is very clear: the mother's body does a marvelous job of protecting the fetus from dangers that have existed on an evolutionary timescale, but there is now a new set of alarming environmental dangers that have intensified in the last several decades. Pregnant women must become aware of them and take steps to avoid the ones they can, and we all must work to change global policies that threaten us all.
My 30-something daughter, who gave me the book, was born during what Steingraber calls the "heyday of the [natural childbirth] movement"-after Grantley Dick-Read and then Marjorie Karmel had reintroduced women into their own birth experiences but before seemingly innocuous technologies sabotaged awake births once again. The books we loved then, Karen Pryor's Nursing Your Baby, Niles Newton's Family Book of Childcare, and Robert Bradley's Husband Coached Childbirth, to name a few, are not up-to-date enough and they do not address the new generation of dangers in pregnancy and birth. Steingraber is up-to-date, and she does address them. I repeat my recommendation to start Having Faith now and to read it often.
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