As moms, we all tend to get talking about our birth stories
from time to time. What do our collective birth days (either those of
our kids, whether we birthed them or adopted them, or...our stories of
our own births) reveal about us? Join us next Wednesday, August 12th as
we discuss the book Birth Day by Mark Sloan, M.D. and talk about our birth days for our next book club.
About the book - Birth Day: A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth (from the publisher, Random House's, website:
"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more
than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year
of medical school.”—from Birth Day
So began Mark
Sloan’s three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of
human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has
attended nearly three thousand births since that long-ago summer,
encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room
dramas. In Birth Day, Sloan draws on his personal and professional
experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and
culture into a fascinating—and often funny—tapestry of this fundamental
human passage.
Birth Day takes the reader on a remarkable
journey, from the dawn of human history to the quiet efficiency of a
modern operating room; from Aristotle and Julius Caesar to a
trailblazing, cross-dressing British army surgeon; from a recent past
filled with the horrors of childbirth gone wrong to a present day, in
which every pregnancy is expected to end happily. Some of Birth Day’s many topics include
• The evolution of human childbirth—or, why do gorillas have it so easy?
•
The first five minutes of life—scuba divers, astronauts, and the
amazing adaptations that transform a fetus into an air-breathing,
out-in-the-world baby
• Cesarean section—a look at its origins, its
future, and how it came to be the most frequently performed operation
in American hospitals
• Pain and politics—the age-old quest for
painless childbirth, starring Adam and Eve, Queen Victoria, a
nineteenth-century medical brawl, and the rise of today’s “epidural
monoculture”
• Daddies—raging paternal hormones, hidden anxieties,
and the emotional evolution of men (including the author, his father,
and grandfather) as they approach fatherhood
• The five senses at
birth—does light enter the womb? how loud is it in there? what is a
newborn baby searching for with those first anxious glances?
• A
tour of the newborn body—springy skulls, hairy ears, innies and outies,
the advantages (and disadvantages) of looking like your father, and why
the United States is one of the world’s most circumcised nations
Delightfully instructive and entertaining, Birth Day offers
a fresh, sometimes irreverent take on a universally familiar topic.
Warm, reassuring, and packed with stories from the author’s work and
life, this unique book is one pediatrician’s meditation on the
hiding-in-plain-sight marvels of human birth.
Read along with us: Buy your copy of the book today and get ready to discuss with us on Wednesday, August 12th. See you at book club!
Past Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Clubs have included:
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