Expecting : One Man's Uncensored Memoir of Pregnancy

Rating:
Summary: Intensely humorous memoir
Review: This smoothly written and extremely funny book presents a surprising bit of news about pregnancy - women aren't the only ones who experience physical symptoms in the months leading up to childbirth. From morning sickness to pronounced changes in certain hormone levels, men have a paternal response to pregnancy that strengthens their bond to mother and child and helps prepare them for fatherhood. The author explains this 'couvade syndrome' through scientific inquiry, cultural comparisons, anecdotes and personal experience, all while tracking his own unfolding saga as an expectant father. The result is a warm and intensely humorous memoir that is also a scientific and biological detective story.

Rating:
Summary: lots of wit and insight, a bit too much sociobiology
Review: This was a great read, at least for someone who's recently been through the experience (though on the female side). Churchwell was really very funny, and also illuminating on the topic of men's reactons to their partners' pregnancies. I could have done without the longest chapter, the one on "pregnant" men's hormone levels, evolutionary advantages to active fatherhood, etc. I kept wondering why Churchwell never seemed to find it necessary to consider the possibility that all these physiological changes are related not to some mechanistic biological process but to the choices and attitudes that these men (and women) were developing toward their pregnancies. Like maybe you get high hormone levels because you're anxiously awaiting the arrival of your offspring, and if for whatever reasons you AREN'T looking forward to it, you don't produce those hormone levels. Cause and effect in the other direction.

Sociobiology notwithstanding, I'd recommend this highly to anyone who's been through this or is thinking about it. Kudos to the publisher on the title change (I read the uncorrected proofs), and I've just got to ask Kirkus, isn't this Churchwell guy a baby-boomer and not a Gen-X? What's the cutoff here?

Rating:
Summary: Probes beyond the usual - starkingly funny
Review: What you always wanted to know but never dared to ask: Gordon Churchwell tells you in his book "Expectant". I never thought there could be so many angles to becoming father - at least to me everything seemed more simple. Churchwell's book is both a narrative in the best of senses about his and his wife's experiences in becoming parents and a more or less scientific, sometimes even philosophical explanation of all the things happening to men during the pregnancy of their partners. The narrative is strinkingly honest, often very funny and becomes quite dramatic towards the end. The "scientific" probing is interesting (did you know that one-third of men have pregnancy symptoms, too?!) and an attempt at getting behind the superficial level of merely going through an experience (as an "event", something that just happens to you). All in all, though, I found it less compelling, there is a lot of medical jargon and somehow the two parts (the narrative and the essay) do not really fit together. It is two genres in one. Nevertheless, the book can be highly recommended to becoming fathers (and to young would-be mothers wanting to make sense from the strange reactions they might get from their blokes during pregnancy). Churchwell should now write the sequel to "Expecting", something like "Surviving: One man's story of living through the first years as a young father". Pregnancy might have its ups and downs, but, boy, bringing up a child (or children) is something different alltogether! (much more demanding)