pPreface/ppIntroduction/pp1. Wanted--A Child To Raise as Our Own: Claiming Strangers as Kinbr /br /2. Families by Design: Fitness and Fit in the Creation of Kinbr /br /3. The Best Solution: Adoption Embracedbr /br /4. Redrawing the Boundaries: Transracial and International Adoptionbr /br /5. Tell It Slant: Adoption and Disclosurebr /br /6. Adoption Challenged: Beyond the Best Solution/ppEpiloguebr /br /Notesbr /br /Index/pFinally we have a history of adoption that is sensitive to all parties. Based on meticulous archival research, Barbara Melosh's superb book tells modern adoption's complicated and surprising story in a lucid, comprehensive manner, laying to rest many old misconceptions but also raising new questions anyone involved with adoption on the personal or policy level must confront.Melosh's brilliant study helps us to understand the ways in which the combined forces of a resurgent sociobiology, cost-benefit market models, and idealized images of natural motherhood have cast adoption into the shadows. We have become a society less generous in opening our homes to strangers who then become kin. Melosh helps us to understand why. iStrangers and Kin/i supersedes all other books on this vital and fraught topic.Gracefully written and brimming with insight, iStrangers and Kin/i tells a story about child adoption during the twentieth century that is as little known as it is significant. With a stunning array of original sources, Melosh provocatively suggests that birth mothers and adoptive parents have been well ahead of policy-makers and professionals in influencing adoption practices and enhancing the reputation and visibility of adoption. Although it has touched only a tiny minority of children and adults, adoption symbolizes the historic American conversation about identity, difference, and solidarity. Anyone interested in belonging--to families, communities, and country--will learn a great deal from

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Price: $16.61 Updated on 5-25-2009.