Buddhism for mothers

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Kate Pullinger

"From the award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing comes a compelling novel that explores the complexity of modern life and the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together. Spring 2010. Harriet works in local radio in London, England. When a volcano erupts in Iceland and airspace shuts down over Europe, stranding most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes the opportunity to take on a larger role at the station. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York, travels to Toronto to stay with an old flame. Their teenage son Jack, liberated from normal life by the absence of airplanes, takes an unexpected risk and finds himself in trouble. Meanwhile, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a labor camp in Dubai, and Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her father to a sudden heart attack. Two years later, their lives intersect dramatically when Yacub, a stowaway, falls out of the landing gear of an airplane and onto Harriet's car in a supermarket parking lot. Yacub's sudden arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events, ultimately drawing them closer to one another. Winner of Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for her debut American novel, The Mistress of Nothing, which Good Housekeeping called "scorchingly powerful," Kate Pullinger draws on real-life accounts of airplane stowaways as the basis for a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections"--

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Ayelet Waldman

In the tradition of recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Perfect Madness comes a hilarious and controversial book that every woman will have an opinion about, written by America's most outrageous writer. In our mothers' day there were good mothers, neglectful mothers, and occasionally great mothers.Today we have only Bad Mothers.If you work, you're neglectful; if you stay home, you're smothering. If you discipline, you're buying them a spot on the shrink's couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. If you buy organic, you're spending their college fund; if you don't, you're risking all sorts of allergies and illnesses.Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as "a bad mother"? Ayelet Waldman says it's time for women to get over it and get on with it, in a book that is sure to spark the same level of controversy as her now legendary "Modern Love" piece, in which she confessed to loving her husband more than her children.Covering topics as diverse as the hysteria of competitive parenting (Whose toddler can recite the planets in order from the sun?), the relentless pursuits of the Bad Mother police, balancing the work-family dynamic, and the bane of every mother's existence (homework, that is), Bad Mother illuminates the anxieties that riddle motherhood today, while providing women with the encouragement they need to give themselves a break.

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Janet Golden

A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle examines the intersection of medical science, social theory, and cultural practices as they shaped relations among wet nurses, physicians, and families from the colonial period through the twentieth century. It explores how Americans used wet nursing to solve infant-feeding problems in the eighteenth century, shows why wet nursing became controversial in the nineteenth century as motherhood slowly became medicalized, and elaborates how the development of scientific infant feeding eliminated wet nursing by the beginning of the twentieth century. Setting these changes in the context of women's history and the history of medicine, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the cultural authority of medical science, the role of physicians in shaping child-rearing practices, the social construction of motherhood, and the profound dilemmas of class and culture that played out in the private space of the nursery.

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Hillary R. Clinton

For more than twenty-five years, First Lady Hiliary Rodham Clinton has made children her passion and her cause. Her long experience with children - not only through her personal roles as mother, daughter, sister, and wife but also as advocate, legal expert, and public servant - has strengthened her conviction that how children develop and what they need to succeed are inextricably entwined with the society in which they live and how well it sustains and supports its families and individuals. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child. This book chronicles her quest - both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public - to discover how we can make our society into the kind of village that enables children to grow into able, caring, resilient adults. It is time, Mrs. Clinton believes, to acknowledge that we have to make some changes for our children's sake. Advances in technology and the global economy along with other developments in society have brought us much good, but they have also strained the fabric of family life, leaving us and our children poorer in many ways - physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. She doesn't believe that we should, or can, turn back the clock to "the good old days." False nostalgia for "family values" is no solution. Nor is it useful to make an all-purpose bogeyman or savior of "government." But by looking honestly at the condition of our children, by understanding the wealth of new information research offers us about them, and, most important, by listening to the children themselves, we can begin a more fruitful discussion about their needs. And by sifting the past for clues to the structures that once bound us together, by looking with an open mind at what other countries and cultures do for their children that we do not, and by identifying places where our "village" is flourishing - in families, schools, churches, businesses, civic organizations, even in cyberspace - we can begin to create for our children the better tomorrow they deserve.