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Loading... Midwivesby Chris Bohjalian
CB is a fellow Vermonter, see him around Burlington occasionally...did NOT like his most recent, 'The Night Strangers' (his foray into the supernatural), also read some of his earlier stuff...he definitely improved as time went by, but still....not one of my first-pick authors. G. ( )I'm in a really bad mood so this review probably should be upgraded a star. Parts of this book really were marvelous. Parts really made me wish it was half as long because I just wanted them to get on with it. I found the diary entries more interesting than the book itself. DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG! I have no idea how Chris Bohjalian wrote the voice of a 14-year-old girl so well that it actually made me remember what it felt like to be 14. AND against my will, mind you. I would do anything to never feel 14 again. There are many other wonderful things about this book. But it's enough to say read it because here is a man writing in the perfect 14-year-old-girl voice and that's some amazing motherfucking writing. Very good
The description of the nightmarish Caesarean Sibyl performs, and why she feels forced to perform it, is harrowing; it is also the book's most effective passage. Mr. Bohjalian has done his homework on midwifery and the mechanics of childbirth. He has also landed on a hot topic for baby boomers -- the whole question of when alternatives to traditional medicine are beneficial, and when they become dangerous.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0375706771, Paperback)Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1998: On a violent, stormy winter night, a home birth goes disastrously wrong. The phone lines are down, the roads slick with ice. The midwife, unable to get her patient to a hospital, works frantically to save both mother and child while her inexperienced assistant and the woman's terrified husband look on. The mother dies but the baby is saved thanks to an emergency C-section. And then the nightmare begins: the assistant suggests that maybe the woman wasn't really dead when the midwife operated:Did she perform at least eight or nine cycles as my mother said, or four or five as Asa recalled? That is the sort of detail that was disputable. But at some point within minutes of what my mother believed had been a stroke, after my mother concluded the cardiopulmonary resuscitation had failed to generate a pulse or a breath, she screamed for Asa and Anne to find her the sharpest knife in the house.In Midwives, Chris Bohjalian chronicles the events leading up to the trial of Sibyl Danforth, a respected midwife in the small Vermont town of Reddington, on charges of manslaughter. It quickly becomes evident, however, that Sibyl is not the only one on trial--the prosecuting attorney and the state's medical community are all anxious to use this tragedy as ammunition against midwifery in general; this particular midwife, after all, an ex-hippie who still evokes the best of the flower-power generation, is something of an anachronism in 1981. Through it all, Sibyl, her husband, Rand, and their teenage daughter, Connie, attempt to keep their family intact, but the stress of the trial--and Sibyl's growing closeness to her lawyer--puts pressure on both marriage and family. Bohjalian takes readers through the intricacies of childbirth and the law, and by the end of Sibyl Danforth's trial, it's difficult to decide which was more harrowing--the tragic delivery or its legal aftermath. Narrated by a now adult Connie, Midwives moves back and forth in time, fitting vital pieces of information about what happened that night like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into its complicated plot. As Connie looks back on her mother's trial, she is still trying to understand what happened--not on the night of the disaster--but in the months and years that followed. --Margaret Prior (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:20:06 -0500) In the pastoral community of Reddington, Vermont, during the harsh winter of 1981, Sibyl Danforth makes a life-or-death decision based on fifteen years of experience as a respected midwife -- a decision intended to save a child, a decision that will change her life forever.… (more) |
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