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Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic (平装)
by Martha Beck
| Category:
Teens, Autobiography, Inspirational |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad memoirs of a young mother awaiting the birth of a Down syndrome baby while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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Julia Flyte (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
I am pregnant, and I was curious to read this book to get a better idea of what it might be like to have a child with Down's Syndrome. Although I enjoyed reading "Expecting Adam", it wasn't at all what I was expecting.
Martha Beck's story is intensely personal. She talks about how her life and her husband's life were transformed by the experience of her carrying and giving birth to Adam, a baby with Down's Syndrome. Throughout her pregnancy they both experienced a number of spiritual experiences and miracles. Subsequent to his birth, Adam has brought much joy and wonder into their lives, completely rearranging their priorities and attitudes to life.
However Martha makes it clear that she doesn't view this as being because Adam has Down's Syndrome. At one stage she consults a psychic who refers to Adam as being an "angel", but who also stresses that his disability is merely a coincidence rather than a factor contributing to his angelic status. Martha makes it clear that she doesn't necessarily view all children with Down's as being as special as Adam. This presents an interesting question about what makes Adam so special and about whether the fact that he has Down's is even relevant to Martha's story.
So rather than being a book about what it is like to carry and give birth to a baby with Down's Syndrome, this book is about what it is like to be transformed from being an ambitious and driven academic to a more spiritual person, by the experience of carrying a child who appears to have spiritual powers. At times I felt that I was reading a memoir written by Mary about being pregnant with the baby Jesus.
Because Martha writes well and her story is told with some humor, I enjoyed reading the book. However I got increasingly frustrated as I went on by how extraordinary she felt her experience to be, and how little I could take from it that was relevant to me or anyone that I knew.
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Liane (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
Maya Angelou once said that "there is no greater agony than holding an untold story inside of you." This piece of work represents Martha Beck's luminous journey towards choosing to mother Adam, her son who was prenatally diagnosed with Down's Syndrome.
Like many mothers of exceptional children I've known, Martha has touched on the one theme most of us feel reluctant to talk about - that our lives are peppered with unexplainable, prescient experiences that served to pave our way towards accepting a child that a highly educated world often believes is less than worthy of a chance at life.
Because Ms. Beck's Harvard Education and academic's resume brings the reader into a metaphycial journey towards coming to accept Adam through a skeptics eyes, her story seems more credible than that of the average person who sits down to write a book that says "oh, but my child is so much more than what he seems."
Martha's tale is as convincing as it is spellbinding. Her range as a writer is vast - she is both a comedian and an accomplished dramatist.
Expecting Adam hits its intended mark. It reminds us that every child comes into this world for reasons that often lay beyond the realm of human reckoning. It offers proof that all lives have purpose, meaning and dignity. On top of all this, Expecting Adam offers the reader the benefit of an excellent writer.
As the mother of two boys with autism, one who "came back" and one who "didn't", I commend this writer for sharing her story.
Ms. Beck's experiences felt universal to me, and true in a way I can't begin to put into words.
When I look into my children's eyes, I understand without reservation that nothing is left to chance. Like Ms. Beck, I feel both humbled and awed by the opportunity to mother children like mine.
It is impossible to read "Expecting Adam", and fail to see that every life has meaning and dignity.
For all things, there is a season...
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Nancy McNamara (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
Expecting Adam is not the story of a child with Down syndrome. It is the heart-felt confession of one woman's personal journey from fear to grace. As the mother of an eight year old boy with an autistic disorder, I fought and wrangled with her story for about the first half of the book, and found myself saying "Come on, Martha, tell me something I don't know." Having conceived my second child while my husband was completing his doctorate, I found eerie similarities to my own experience, from questioning mysticism and other - worldly phenonoma, to being in complete awe of our son when he does what we call his "God Thing." Even so I felt she was exaggerating her own experience,and taking liberties with the academic environment in which she lived. Since most readers won't have an insider's understanding of what it is like be the parents of a "non-perfect" baby in the halls of academia, I felt that I would qualify any recommendation that I made by saying, "Take in all the parts except Harvard - she went a bit overboard there."
But then, somewhere in the middle of the book, it was as if Martha was right there whispering in my ear, "open your heart..." And so, I did. The next morning, after finishing the book, I was shouting orders to my four children, doing my best Captain von Trapp imitation, and getting nowhere fast in readying them for school. There was spilled juice, slopped cereal, and a screaming baby. My "disabled" son, sensing my mounting frustration, asked just at the wrong moment to have his shoes tied. I threw down the kitchen towel in exasperation and left the room for a few minutes to collect myself. I then sheepishly returned to the rallying cry of, "Lets all be chickens!" And there he was, my son, making the others laugh and smile, clearing away the mess, collecting backpacks, and all the while flapping his arms like wings and making his best chicken sounds. We all piled into the car, slightly late, but smiling, and as he got out he gave me a wet, sloppy kiss. He took me by the shoulders and said, "Mommy, if I ever lose you, my heart will not feel so good." He walked away, doing his best imitation of a man walk, and I drove back home, crying and laughing at the same time.
And then I felt them. Martha's Bunraku puppeteers. Or at least, my own version of them. Because at that moment I have never been happier to be parent, let alone the parent of a child with very special needs. All my fears for his future (and mine) were obliterated by a wonderfully calm place in my heart, something I have felt many times before, but could never have expressed as beautifully and honestly as Martha Beck. Thank you, Martha, for putting into words so many of the feelings that I have, but have been too fearful to admit and put down on paper. I hope that I become more graceful in time with my own journey, as you have shown the world that you are with yours.
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John Foraker (MSL quote) , USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
As a mother of an eight month old baby with Down Syndrome, I avoided this book at first because I thought it would be too wrenching and close to home. It had the opposite effect. It has been an absolutely incredible experience. Martha Beck bravely and genuinely shares her true account of her pregnancy and experiences before and after her son Adam's birth. She discovers he has Down Syndrome before he is born but cannot even consider abortion. Throughout the nine months, Martha (and her husband)experience many paranormal/spiritual events. This might seem unconvincing or even wacky from any other source, but as a Harvard trained academician, Martha makes her story not only plausible but grippingly real. Her sense of humor is hilarious and I openly laughed out loud several times! I also openly wept at her raw and vivid descriptions of the revulsion so many of us have for those who are different. I think this book is a fantastic tool for parents of children with disabilities to give to the outside world. This is how we see our children, truly! It would also be a terrific book for any teacher or educator to read. To me, it's been a hope, a salve, an inspiration.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
I was surprised by the review describing Martha Beck as a whiner. I read this book yesterday (yes, in one day - I was mesmerized) and can't remember any whining. It was the opposite - a description of her joy, wonderment, and surprise that life could hold what it began to hold for her when she was expecting her son, Adam. I can't get this book out of my mind; I am still processing it. Although I am not a skeptic about supernatural things, her experiences don't exactly fit into my worldview and I'm trying to figure out what they might mean. Meanwhile, however, the book changed my perceptions of what it might be like to have a child with Down Syndrome (something I've contemplated and even researched before, when a friend got suspicious test results during her pregnancy). And I thought the descriptions of her life at Harvard were equally as fascinating as anything else in the book. As the wife of a former academic, I was both amused and amazed by her encounters with people at Harvard and her own ivory tower naivete, and as a southwesterner I had a bit of a culture shock reading about people who would just step over a pregnant woman who had fainted rather than stop to help her. This book is very well written and full of incredible insights and experiences (I read many passages aloud to my husband). I think parts of the story will resonate with anyone who has been struck by the incredible, unbelievable gift of a baby, as I have been with my own son. I imagine that those who are suspicious of anything they can't see will find much to narrow their eyes at while reading this book, yet it seems to me that only those who have never known what it's like to love a child could truly dislike it.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
I've just completed Expecting Adam which my wife calls her favorite book she's ever read. This high praise echoes my own sentiments although, I did find it was a bit hard to get into the book. But once it happened, I was whisked into the wacky world of a self admitted overachiever from Harvard who is expecting a Down Syndrome child... As I read I grew to love many things about this book. First and foremost, here we have a master crafter of language weaving her story from past to future.,giving us a glimpse of Adam at his 2nd birthday or a troubling moment. Then gracefully returning you to the present or recent past. Her honesty is slightly raw but frankly I feel that it is something that you begin to trust deeply as the story progresses. If she's telling you the truth about her fears and problems with her pregnancy, she must be also telling the truth about her paranormal experiences. I have read some of the other reviewers who accuse Martha of being a whiner and I can actually understand where they're coming from. I don't personally think of her as whining but someone without a certain kind of background might interpret her self criticism and problems at Harvard this way. My way of viewing her "whining" is that she freely details her frustrations, fears and feelings around stereotyping of down syndrome kids and her problems with her health and raising a family. My reactions to this evolved with each chapter. I felt I grew to understand her frustrations more as I got to know her and in the end grew to love every complaint that she cared to share with us because it seemed to invite me deeper into her intimate world.
Beyond this very intimate portrait of Martha and her family, this story also let's us view a spiritual story which began with her pregnancy. This kind of patchwork spirituality was, by the middle of the book, credible and compelling. It's another reason that whinner doesn't quite fit. One more thing that pervades the book is this woman's sense of humor. Her humor happens only occasionally in her book but when it happens it is utterly suprising and delightfully offbeat. I found myself laughing out loud many times. Finally, there is a part of the book which no one I've read talks about. The relationship of Martha and her husband. It's not a big part of the book, but I found myself crying (something I rarely do), over their relationship problems and the way they worked through their issues. These things made the book come alive to me along with her struggles. There are many reasons to criticize this book. It's cursory and yet bizarre treatment of Mormonism, her weird family and her portrait of Harvard as a harsh world. But to me, these are merely footnotes to an inspirational story that touches very deep.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
Martha Beck dubs her tale A True Story of Birth, Rebirth, and Everyday Magic and sets the imagination churning with her wit and wisdom. An account of a Harvard sociology graduate student from Utah who decides not to abort her Down Syndrome baby sounds more like the recipe for a tragedy than a satire, but Beck is full of surprises. For me Beck's book was a witty critique our success-oriented society, on academia, on pretense and on parents. Beck dreads the mindset that leads our society toward perfect babies, perfect students, and perfect breadwinners, and away from perfect content.
This story carries you high and low over the hurdles and under the weather with Martha all through her pregnancy. You feel the harsh sting of the truth, the terror of the unknown, and the crumbling of life-long plans. Over and above all else this book is a secret look at one of the ways in which life manages to outwit our calculations. The strong survive because they bend, because they stretch to fit the life that chance throws in their path. Perhaps those of us who plan our life events as though they were dinner parties are really weak, weak because we do not know how to rejoice in the unexpected.
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Joseph Dewey (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
I think that Martha Beck is honestly trying to write a book about 1) How to come to terms with having a child with Down's syndrome, and 2) How to survive in a world that seems to be against you.
At those two purposes, she fails miserably.
However, this is a fascinating book, because it is a few levels deep, and is actually about much more than Martha intended it to be.
If you're reading this review, you've probably already read this book. It's really worth another read, keeping one or more of the following topics in mind.
Topic #1: A woman's struggle with bulimia
Signs of this first topic permeate the first half of the book. I hesitate to bring this up, because I know that morning sickness, especially severe morning sickness is real. However, there are cues to that this is not just morning sickness, and it's not just the unusually violent morning sickness because of her autoimmune disorder. It's something more. Like many people with bulimia, Martha hates her bulimia. She would love to talk about it, but she needs to keep it guarded. During her descriptions of throwing up, it becomes obvious that she's been wanting to talk about throwing up for quite a while, but that the only way she can "safely" do so is to mask her bulimia behind her morning sickness.
Topic #2: A wife's denial that she is in love with a gay man
John is made out to be a manly man--an artificially manly man. In fact, whenever he can be talked about as manly, he is described as manly. Why does she have this need to make him into being so manly? Also, a pervasive theme throughout this book is how connected they are, how they are soul mates. This is all done in a very artificial way. Martha seems to be trying to convince herself way too hard that John loves her in a straight way.
Topic #3: How mean spiritedness can sometimes help people to cope
It's interesting how this book has been rated so high, and Martha's subsequent book has been rated so low. Both use the technique of mean spiritedness. However, I think that the difference is who the mean spiritedness is directed at.
In this book the mean spiritedness is directed at a) Stuffy Harvard intellectuals, who push people too hard academically, b) People with prejudice toward people with disabilities, and c) People who viscously advocate a "abortion at all costs" attitude toward children. These are all socially accepted people to be mean spirited towards.
In her next book, the mean spiritedness is directed at a) her dying 90-year-old father, and b) devout religious people. Devout religious people is an iffy topic to be mean spirited toward, but being mean spirited toward your dying 90-year-old father is always taboo.
It's fascinating how this book does a pretty good job at masking her mean spiritedness, because of whom the mean spiritedness is targeted to.
I know that a lot of people use the coping mechanism of being mean after the fact when the people who hurt them are no longer there. However, I think there are much better ways of dealing with underlying problems.
Topic #4: How some people "sensitively" treat people with disabilities as animals
I've noticed that the people I know who have members of their families with disabilities fall into three categories: a) that they treat their family members as equals, b) that they treat their family members as "special" or animals, that they can condescendingly "learn" from, and c) that they really don't like their family members, and they ignore or shun them. I think that of the people I know, that 80% fall into the first category, 10% fall into the second, and 10% fall into the third.
Martha Beck falls into the second category. Adam is not an equal. He is someone to condescendingly "learn" from. I was thinking this all the way through the book, and I was surprised when Martha confirmed this by literally comparing Adam to a pet cat in the last 20 pages.
I was sad about this. I know a lot of people who are in the first category, who aren't condescending to their family members with disabilities. It's too bad that more of those people don't write books about their stories.
Topic #5: Hypochondria doesn't even do this topic justice
The author mentions every time that John was sick in the seven years chronicled by this book. The author mentions about ten different diseases or disorders that she has, none of which is bulimia or mental illness, which I could believe. I could believe that she has an occasional disorder or two, but ten is a bit much to be believable.
Topic #6: How an extremely religious upbringing can leave someone soulless
This topic fascinates me. Martha grew up in a regimented, religious environment. She tried to escape it by going atheist for a while, and then was ultimately pulled back fiercely, and became a lot more of a "religious crazy" than she ever was before.
This kind of thing happens all of the time. Look at any religious fanatic that you have ever met, and they have the same story...a) Extremely strict and kind of weird religious upbringing, b) an attempt to escape and an attempt to turn their backs without ever dealing with the issues that their upbringing caused, and c) the metamorphosis into being a prophet-like figure, by figuring out some new truths above and beyond what the religious dogma of their youth taught, and d) a need to share these new truths with others.
This is Martha's story to a T.
And, the fascinating thing is that this cycle leaves a person without a heart and without a soul, and totally fixated on their new religious truths.
Topic #7: A chronicle of one person's descent into mental illness
Usually, if someone has a supernatural "gift," then it would get exhibited in one or two ways. Martha has about twenty distinctly different supernatural "gifts." I think that Superman only has about 15, and those are the fictional products of over 100 writers over the last 70 years.
I think that one supernatural gift is believable. Two to three are questionable, and four or more indicate mental illness. Martha has twenty.
The fascinating thing for me was trying to figure out what was actually real.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
It's a shame that people are unwilling to accept possibilities simply because it's beyond the scope of their experience. In reading the reviews here, I understand why people have trouble believing. But, they shouldn't completely discount someone else's experience just because it's different from their own. While I've had nothing in my life nearly as miraculous as Martha Beck's experiences, I've had enough strange occurrences to know that what she writes is absolutely possible. And, there are many people who have had extraordinary experiences. I wish the same for the rest of you who are too closed-minded to open up to the possible. Your life will be forever changed for the better.
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Peggy Vincent (MSL quote), USA
<2007-02-27 00:00>
Expecting Adam is more than the sum of its parts.
On the surface, it's the beautifully-written story of a woman facing a difficult choice - and choosing the opposite of what professionals in the academic and intellectual mileu of Harvard advise her to do. She chooses not to abort her Downs Syndrome child, Adam.
Beck comes from a Mormon upbringing, which may have influenced her choice, although she has broken from the practice of the faith of her childhood (without breaking from her family).
But more than being just a book about choice, it's a book about spirituality of the New Age variety, a transforming process that leaves the author herself confounded by and almost disbelieving of the metaphysical and 'New Age crystal kissing' woo-woo 'stuff' that happens to her during the process of her pregnancy, birth, and her son's babyhood.
Adam becomes her teacher, her conduit into a deep and mysterious world that she, herself, barely believes in.
I found myself suspending disbelief and just going with the flow of this lovely book. It transcends and defies classification.
Read it and judge for yourself.
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