Synopses & Reviews
From the moment Martha and her husband, John, accidentally conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. They'd plotted out a future in the most vaunted ivory tower of academe. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them that if they decided to keep the baby, they would lose all hope of achieving their carefully crafted goals. Fortunately, that's exactly what happened. Expecting Adam is a poignant, challenging, and achingly funny chronicle of the extraordinary nine months of Martha's pregnancy. By the time Adam was born, Martha and John were propelled into a world in which they were forced to redefine everything of value to them, put all their faith in miracles, and trust that they could fly without a net. And it worked.
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"A wonderful book, funny, unbelievably tender, and smart. It shimmers." Anne Lamott, Author of Operating Instructions and Traveling Mercies
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"I laughed. I cried. I couldn't put it down. I didn't want it to end. I wish I knew Adam and his familyand of course I do. A brave, uplifting, life-transforming book." Sophy Burnham
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"Set half in Harvard and half in heaven, Expecting Adam is a tough-minded yet tender-hearted book of spiritual discovery a rueful, riveting, piercingly funny, thoroughly modern and deeply old-fashioned memoir: In short, a book to be reckoned with." Julia Cameron
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"Expecting Adam is not one of those grit-your-teeth, lemons-into-lemonade sagas that leave the reader feeling more besieged and guilty than the writer. It is a long hymn, from a practical woman caught flatfooted by amazing grace. Martha Beck is a celebrant skeptics can trust." Jacquelyn Mitchard, Author of The Deep End of the Ocean
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"Martha Beck is smart...[and] sympathetic....[and] also a pretty good teacher....The story trembles on the verge of tragedy again and again, but it has a happy ending after all....'Whoever said that love is blind was dead wrong,' [Beck writes.] 'Love is the only thing on this earth that lets us see each other with the remotest accuracy.'" Susan Cheever, The New York Times Book Review
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"Hooked me on the first page." Detroit Free Press
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"Poignant. So many side-splitting quips and hard-fought insights that I challenge any reader not to be moved by it." New York Newsday
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"Besides a sense of humor that pokes as much fun at herself as anyone, Beck has both a sharp eye and a sharp tongue. Her portraits of Harvard academics, omniscient doctors, and uptight in-laws are priceless. Even skeptics will findmagic in this story, and parents of a Down's syndrome child will cherish it." Kirkus Reviews