I’ve gotten my large shipment of summer reading from Amazon. I have so much that I must read during school year that when summer comes, it seems a pure luxury to me to read what I want, when I want, as slow as I want. I’ll periodically post here about books I’m reading.

First up is a book on a subject very close to me. You all know that I was adopted at birth and that in 1998 I reunited with my birth mother, Barbara, after a blessedly short search. Although Barbara and I have spoken some about what it was like for her during her pregnancy with me, I really didn’t have an accurate understanding of what it must have been like for her. One book will crack your heart wide open with compassion for those women who relinquished children to adoption. It is “The Girls Who Went Away : The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade” by Ann Fessler. It’s a gripping book, every page full of poignancy, based on over 100 oral histories of women who became pregnant and placed their children for adoption in the 50s and 60s. See what The New York Times, National Public Radio, Mother Jones and other well respected journalists are talking about.