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Loading... Midwivesby Chris Bohjalian
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. http://www.amazon.com/Midwives-Oprahs... Read like a very long short story in the very best way. The author slowly let doubt grow in my mind just as it did in the mind of the teenage narrator in this book. Although the book is primarily written from the viewpoint of a teenage girl (14 years old) there are passages from the diary of her mother who is accused of killing a patient in her midwife practice. But doubt was already growing in my mind because the narrator reveals that she is now an ob-gyn physician. I liked the whole family and did not emotionally want this wife/mother/midwife to go to prison. But then was I starting to think (very typically) just like the teen daughter and fearful about the impact of a conviction for manslaughter would have on this likeable family and not on the truth of the midwife's actions. The real question was whether or not this woman did the best she could in the moment and if the best she could do was enough. Is the narrator now a medically trained doctor because she is compensating for what her mother did--which was not enough? Human actions are rarely easy to judge. I enjoyed the rural Vermont setting and the warmth and joy expressed around birthing babies. The progress of the legal case and court trial was also interesting. ABG,, midwives, Vermont, court case, daughter, mother, deaTh, birth On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of a stroke. But what if her patient wasn't dead - and Sibyl inadertently killed her? Finely written book. One you think about long after you're done. 0.133 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (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 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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