Baltipink reviewed American Baby by Gabrielle Glaser
Review of 'American Baby' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This book was hard to read and even harder to rate. There are a lot of details about the shame baby era that I wasn't aware of and genuinely had my jaw dropping. Just when I thought I had reached the bottom of our societies depravities, there's a whole nother layer. I appreciated the idea of weaving one family's story with the overarching institutional narrative, but I found a lot of the personal details tedious. And the author's unwillingness to problematize, or at least better contextualize, the history and relationship to Israel is frankly triggering. Still, there is a lot here that is important, not just about adoption and the sexism, classism, and racism/eugenics that infuses it, but also about the nonprofit industrial complex and the roll of the intellectual "elite" in perpetuating oppression. Read alongside The Girls Who Went Away, but also even more Sex at the Margins and …
This book was hard to read and even harder to rate. There are a lot of details about the shame baby era that I wasn't aware of and genuinely had my jaw dropping. Just when I thought I had reached the bottom of our societies depravities, there's a whole nother layer. I appreciated the idea of weaving one family's story with the overarching institutional narrative, but I found a lot of the personal details tedious. And the author's unwillingness to problematize, or at least better contextualize, the history and relationship to Israel is frankly triggering. Still, there is a lot here that is important, not just about adoption and the sexism, classism, and racism/eugenics that infuses it, but also about the nonprofit industrial complex and the roll of the intellectual "elite" in perpetuating oppression. Read alongside The Girls Who Went Away, but also even more Sex at the Margins and The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.