Book Reviews

The Cry and the Covenant

This historical novel covers the life of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who discovered the cause of childbed fever more than 100 years ago. Carefully researched and vividly written, the book is educational because of what it reveals about human nature.

Mother and Child Were Saved: The Memoirs (1693-1740) of the Frisian Midwife

The notebook of the Frisian midwife, Vrouw Schrader, is one of the most exciting books which has come into my hands in recent years. This translation makes this important work available now to the English-speaking audience, although we’ll have to wait a few more years for the rest of Vrouw Schrader’s voluminous writings to be published in English. The largest part of her notebook, which contains more than 3000 records of births she attended, was published in Dutch as recently as 1984.

Doctor Clegg’s Machete

I didn’t have to think twice before choosing this little novel for the first book review I’ve written since I discontinued publishing the quarterly magazine Birth Gazette in 2000. First, and in some sense, most important, Doctor Clegg’s Machete is a good read. John Hargreaves has created a cast of believable characters, a credible plot line and a book that is as suspenseful as it is informative.

Active Management of Labor

Active management of labor is a quintessential example of the medicalization of birth, illustrating key elements in the inappropriate use of technology described in Dr. Wagner's latest book, Pursuing the Birth Machine: The Search for Appropriate Birth Technology

What is Normal?

Episiotomy: Challenging Obstetric Interventions

Did you ever wonder how and why episiotomy became routine practice in the first place, why it persisted so long despite the lack of evidence that it was beneficial, and why it only began to be questioned in the late 1980s? If so, this is the book for you.

Try to Feel It My Way

Suzette Haden Elgin has a passion for teaching people how to communicate better with each other. In this useful little book, she concentrates on people who are "touch dominant."

Motherhood and Mental Health

Here's a book I wish I could make required reading for all criminal prosecutors, lawyers, journalists and legislators in the United States. To be even more thorough, I would add the morally self-righteous, whatever their job description, to the foregoing list.

The author is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Birmingham in England. He has drawn upon literature of both the present day and the past to document what is currently known about women's mental health as it relates to pregnancy, birth and its aftermath.

From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey

Like the natural childbirth movement, the quest to recover healing in medicine has been underway for approximately three decades. From Doctor to Healer was written because of Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John's shared fascination with the new breed of healer who is part of this movement. (From here on, I'll refer to Davis-Floyd and St.