Rating: 
Summary: Knowledge is Power--Self-knowledge Is More Powerful
Review: Creating a Life (a great-on-many-levels title!) is a wonderful book-moving and well researched. As many well know, central to all our lives is the push-and-pull between love and work. Sylvia Hewlett beautifully articulates these tensions, which my baby boomer generation friends, my patients (I'm a psychotherapist) and I have grappled with through the last two or three decades. As women, we have gradually, with the help of the woman's movement, asserted control over every aspect of our lives. It is very hard to hear that if you waited to get your career in place, you don't have infinite reproductive choices. In other words, you have no control over this one area of life that you never thought would be a problem. (After all, when we were growing up, didn't we all know women who had had "change of life babies"?) No wonder this book has stirred up so much anxiety!Ms Hewlett's goal is not, as some seem to fear, to panic 30-somethings into stampeding into a premature relationship and/or parenthood before they are ready, but to implore them to make informed decisions based on the knowledge that their reproductive choices are considerably diminished by their late 30s. Ms Hewlett does a great service to young women and men by suggesting that today's plans need to take long term desires into account in order to balance career and family. We're all, to some extent, making it up as we go along, but the benefit of this timely national debate is to encourage honest self-reflection both for individuals and the corporate culture.
Rating: 
Summary: Good statistics - bad conclusions
Review: The statistics about declining fertility and the number of childless (or childfree) women over the age of 40, by various income categories, was eye-opening. After that, her analysis falls flat on its face. She bases her assumption that these women *regret* not having children on the basis of whether they knew in college that they didn't want kids. In doing so, she completely dismisses women who decided *after* college that having kids wasn't for them. How many of us really want the same things in life that we thought were important back in college, anyway? Her agenda is to portray women as helpless victims of "society" and "corporate America." So the solution is supposed to be more laws, more government regulations, and more social engineering at the expense of the taxpayer. The early feminists fought for equal pay for equal work, yet Hewlett advocates a Scandinavian welfare state program that allows women to work only six hours a day until their kids are 8 years old. And who is supposed to pay for this? This book is a disgusting attempt to skew statistics and sway people into a blatantly socialist agenda.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful Message
Review: Ms. Hewlett delivers her powerful message in a poignant and engaging manner. The women she interviewed were brave and honest in sharing the personal details of their private lives. The facts are not what liberal feminists want to hear. We are still hard pressed to control the biological limits of reproduction regardless of our intellect or wealth. This book is an important read for both sexes. I am giving it as a gift to my overworked friends. It is time we all get a life as well as create one.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for young men and women
Review: Hewlett's book is a must read for young women and men who hope to have families as well as careers or work outside of the home. Or for that fact for anyone irregardless of their plans for the future. We can't always "have it all" and I know we can't "do it all," but we need to think about the choices we make and take positive action to shape the kind of lives we want.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't dismiss this book out of hand....
Review: ....because you think Hewlett has an anti-feminist agenda! I am one of the "high achieving" women that Hewlett describes in her book. I make in excess of $200K, have a demanding professional career....and I desperately want to be a mom too. Luckily, I am married, and I'm only 31. Unluckily, we're in the midst of expensive and emotionally/physically taxing infertility treatments. It happens more than young women may think. I certainly never expected to have trouble. Now I see all these women just like me, struggling to have children. Many people don't see this, because infertility is a very isolating, and painfully personal tragedy. Who wants to go public with being infertile? From my seat in the clinic waiting room, in chat rooms, in discussions with female co-workers, it looks like a silent epidemic. I do not regret waiting until my 30s to start a family -- putting aside my job, I was not emotionally ready to do that. But after reading Hewlett's book, I know that if I want a family (and I do), I was right to start now -- she is dead on when she talks about how the ART industry and the media lull women into a false sense of security about their fertility. There *is* a biological clock, and it should be factored into the choices we make -- not ignored wholesale. I find the controversy over this book very sad and funny at the same time. Wasn't feminism all about giving women all the information they need to make reasoned choices? The whole idea that feminism is about steering young women into go-go professional careers is as short-sighted and uni-dimensional as the way we deal with the threat of eating disorders (that it's not OK to tell kids to exercise and lose weight because they might develop an eating disorder -- meanwhile most of the country is now overweight). Hewlett is not saying that women like me should have chucked the idea of getting a professional degree, and that I should have been barefoot and pregnant at home by 22. She's just trying to share another side of the story. Knowledge is such a powerful thing. I used to look at women above me and assume that they had chosen to be alone and childless. Now (both from personal experience and from the stories in Hewlett's book), I know that the truth is likely more complicated. Why is it wrong to reveal the regrets that powerful and successful women have about remaining childless? Shouldn't we celebrate ALL the things that women are capable of, including child-bearing? Why ignore that? What is wrong with letting young women know that there are temporal limitations to "having it all" and that one should plan accordingly? Better to know what the potential pitfalls are now, than to find out when it's too late. As a book, I thought that it was a little too surface-y in its discussions. The book is mostly a collection of quotes and stories (deeply moving stories) from successful women, interspersed with results from her survey. It's not a scholarly treatise, and is a quick read. But it is a book worth reading because it raises issues and questions that should not be dismissed lightly.
Rating:
Summary: A Provocative and Insightful Book
Review: In Creating A Life, Sylvia Ann Hewlett has written a book which needs to be read by all, especially young women who are beginning to make life choices and life decisions concerning their professional and private life. Hewlett makes a strong case for the need of women to know and understand the ramifications of wanting a family and perhaps of putting this decision off for too many years. With the accurate information which she supplies in the book, as well as the interviews with countless women and men, women can be in charge of taking control of their lvies and plotting a journey through their young adulthood into their middle years.
Hewlett has also generated much discussion in the media as she has made the rounds to the various talk shows as well as having appeared in several magazines. How healty for all, men and women, of different ages to be able to have healthy disucssions around these topics.
This book will be read and talked about for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Very depressing
Review: As a woman who has been dealing with infertility for 6 years, I thought this would be a help to put my mind to rest as we approach our final attempt at IVF and our outlook toward work and family. Instead, I found myself wondering if there was any hope at pursuing this venture yet another time. If you are doing research on the subject this book is for you - filled with lots of statistics - most negative to a woman over 40 trying to conceive. I cried through most of it and ended up throwing it in the trash. Yes, the over 40 generation knows the percentages, but lets focus on the positives of those that work!
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: I found this an extraordinarily fascinating, challenging and engrossing treatment of a topic which I thought I was pretty familiar with. But this book placed the challenges facing professional women in a new and much broader context, and showed the interplay of so many facets. I also found some of the interviews gripping, and came away with a much deeper appreciation of the choices and decisions young professional women face.
Rating:
Summary: An ideal gift for your daughter
Review: Sylvia Hewlett's book is oustanding. Women who have daughters who plan to combine family and career must give this wonderful book to their daughters. Ms. Hewlett, in reminding women of the short life of the biological clock, is doing them a great service. The book is well written, well researched and a great resource for young women as they decide on their futures.
Rating:
Summary: All young women should read this book
Review: Sylvia Hewlett's book was extremely enlightening. It is definitely a book all young women should read. Many young women and friends of mine really do not realize the facts about fertility and the choices you have to make in life. The surveys and interviews in this book really make one think about how to live your own life. It is interesting that many people have trouble accepting the facts because they wish that they were different. However if you want the truth, this book is essential reading.
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