Tuesday, August 19, 2008

New book: Gail Landsman, "Reconstructing Motherhood"

[Image description: Book cover featuring a Picasso-esque image of a mother and baby, in overlapping squares of color, with blue predominating.]

I've found Gail Landsman's journal articles useful and insightful for years; I've cited them and shared them with students and friends. So I'm pleased to note that Landsman's got a new book out today, Reconstructing Motherhood and Disability in the Age of "Perfect" Babies (Routledge 2008). Landsman is an anthropologist who studies mothers whose babies have diagnoses such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy, and how they (we!) revise or reinvent their (our!) ideas about parenting and personhood after learning such diagnoses. (Or not, I guess; some don't.) The chapter titles are a good indication of her topics, but don't communicate the abundance of real, honest, human voices in Landsman's work--including her own. I've probably read article versions of some of these, but it's still going on my wishlist.