Nothing more than another whining infertile wishing to strip all biological parents of their constitutional rights to parent their children without government interference, in hopes of increasing the already flooded pool of children awaiting adoption.

Ms. Bartholet does an excellent job of pointing out the serious flaws in the child welfare system in this country. Instead of calling for reform of what doesn't work, she contends the whole system should be thrown out. What she seems to be trying to say is that parents are replaceable and interchangeable, and children don't greive the loss of biological or cultural attachments. Her shift from removing children from abusive or neglectful parents to removing them from those she considers sub-standard is frighteningly Orwellian. While her suggestions would certainly make the pool of adoptable children more appealing for infertile couples and singles who will settle for nothing less than the healthy white infant/toddler, it does nothing for children living with parents they love, and love them, in spite of their failings.

Love and parenting are issues far to complicated to follow her suggestion that anything less than perfection demands all ties be severed.

This book is great, because it talks about what foster care is about in the eyes of the author. I to have had my share of the juvenile courts issue. My children were removed from me on Dec. 16, 1990 by a police office not a social worker. I was charged on hearsay issues. I have always loved my children, but my mother had stolen my children because I was poor and unmarried. Now I have formed a class action against the abuse of the system.

Read this book written by a civil rights lawyer, feminist and Harvard Law professor who challenges traditional left and right poliltical perspectives on child abuse, family preservation and adoption. She is the mother of one child by birth and two by adoption who writes with power and emotion about the meaning of parenting and family.

She looks at the battered women's movement and asks why we have come to think that adult women should be liberated from abusive homes but still insist that children be kept at home pursuant to family preservation policies without regard to the level of abuse and neglect suffered.

Bartholet takes on the child welfare establishment and asks us to join her in pushing for radical rethinking of first premises. She wants our society to take adoption seriously for the first time ever, moving abused and neglected children into real homes so that they can survive and thrive. She wants to knock down the racial barriers that stand in the way of "Nobody's Children" finding the parents they need. And, finally, she points out that now is the time for reform if ever there is a time.

This book was VERY,VERY DISAPPOINTING!It had only 2 chapters on 30yrs.of being a SLAVE(if you can believe that!) and 13 CHAPTERS
on 4 yrs. in the White House!!
GO FIGURE!!!!! I am SO SORRY I had my daughter get this book for me for Mother's DAY!

The story/diary it self I found wasn't written very good.However I found Ms.Keckley's relationship with Mrs.Mary Todd Lincoln and her family intersting.
She gave some insightfll thoughts about Mary and Abraham that was quite a treat to read.

I got a copy of this book from a book fair not on purpose. As a non-native English learner, what strikes me is the ability of Keckley to express rich emotions in very simple words and sentences. I always like reading first person narratives, fictions or true stories, but seldom find one as captivating as this. A five-star from me and it's a pity she didn't seem
to have written other books.

Brown's The Power of Sympathy is a strange set of letters that form a strange world where sentimentality is outrageously rampant and its characters drawn in flat, lifeless tones. The main story (although that's a hard definition to give to anything in this jumble) is that of Harriot and Harrington, who fall in love. The correspondence that makes up the novel is mainly between Harrington and his friend Worthy - Harriot has one of the smallest roles in the story. Other seduction stories are told, all of them a little ridiculous. In one instance, a woman is tricked into a man's carriage, and her faithful, loving fiance immediately despairs and drowns himself in the river. Other men of the village track down the carriage and bring her back, but the man who apparantly loved her gave up all hope when she lost her innocence. What a bleak tale. This novel of morality is actually very shallow, enforcing and reinforcing one idea only: that of the sin of being seduced or seducing. Of course, Brown wrote for a female audience, so it can perhaps be assumed that the only sin they really needed to worry about was losing their virtue. And of the ten main characters in all the seduction stories in Sympathy (there are five separate seductions, I think), 6 do not survive to the end. According to Brown, the wages of sin are most definitely death.
These characters are either so boring or so over the top emotional that I found it hard to draw a good lesson from any of it. At the end, when tragedy has struck, Harrinton sends a series of distraut letters to Worthy, each one saying, in effect, "I'm going to kill myself." Worthy's somewhat delayed response is a dismal attempt to save the life of his friend. "Our prison grows familiar," Worthy tells Harrinton, "there is not one but finds his partiality for his dungeon increase...how few are they who are hardy enough to break their prison?" That's not a very good attempt to keep a grieving man from taking his life, and that last part almost seems like Worthy is egging Harrington on, saying, "c'mon, chicken, I bet you WON'T kill yourself, you aren't hardy enough!"

The Coquette - this is a far more interesting tale, starting out with a sort of anti-heroine in Eliza Wharton. She does enjoy society, and seems to have her heart in the right place, but is easily and repeatedly misled by the novel's rake, one Major Sanford. The story gets muddled as it tries to fictionalize a true account of Elizabeth Whitman, who bore an illegitimate child and died shortly after. The introduction by Carla Mulford gives us some information on the real woman, and it seems pretty clear that Whitman fully encouraged the love affair that led to her ultimate ruin. Foster attempts to make Eliza Wharton into a fully sympathetic character - Wharton denies to everyone that Sanford wishes ill for her, and seems never to notice (until too late) that he does not have good intentions. The effort to reconcile the real Whitman, 37 and completely in control of her (mis)conduct with the completely guileless woman who elicits pity from even the hardest heart does not quite work, and leaves a mysterious chasm.
All of Eliza's friends, her mother, her rejected ex-fiance, warn her about the intentions of Sanford. The fact that Eliza still believes he is a good man means that she is either completely oblivious, or pretending not to know his true colors so that she has an excuse to remain in his company. I think that Foster probably did not intend the second character to come across, but I think THAT Eliza would have been more compelling than the one we are given. What an interesting tale that would have been...sort of another Shamela. But, especially when compared to Brown's "Sympathy," "The Coquette" is really an interesting morality tale. Eliza, before descending into pure imbecility, makes a lot of compelling arguments for her freedom and her desire to remain as she was in society, which her society would not tolerate.

I needed some easy icebreakers for a bible study group (about 12 people) to help people get to know each other better. I didn't find anything that I could use -- not one. Do a web search on 'icebreakers' instead. You'll find a college website with some good ones.