NONFICTIONI
Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank
by Randi Hutter Epstein, $24.95
Seven hundred years ago, a Spanish doctor named Arnold of Villanova wanted to make a baby. He put semen in a womb- shaped vase and waited. The result was disappointing.
We can shake our head at the naivete of believing sperm contains teeny-tiny human beings just needing the proper place to grow. But physician and medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein is here to tell us in “Get Me Out,” her engrossing survey of the history of childbirth, that even with all of today’s whiz-bang technology, “We are still in the dark about so many things that go into making babies.”
Writing that pregnancy has always been “a wonderful blend of custom and science,” Epstein takes us on a delightful romp through past guides that are filled with a whole lot of do-this-but- avoid-that advice.
“You’ve got to be kidding me” will be the reaction to most of it. For instance, on the recommendation of one folk healer, 16th-century French queen Catherine de Medici drank mares’ urine and soaked in cow manure to get pregnant.
The history of childbirth is filled with grief as well as joy, and not all the stories amuse. I shuddered at the descriptions of medieval C-sections, American slaves used as gynecological guinea pigs and the horrific effects of synthetic estrogen given to pregnant women in high doses from the late 1930s to the early ’70s.
Later, the author raises questions about the moral, legal and medical consequences of the growing — and little-regulated — fertility industry. The description of doctors watching over frozen, sperm-filled vials echoes, however faintly, the story of Arnold of Villanova and his vase.
Childbirth has come a very long way since that experiment, but perhaps not as far as we would like to think.
NONFICTION
A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation
by Daniel Menaker, $20
Reading about conversation might seem paradoxical: a solitary take on a social activity. But Daniel Menaker’s “A Good Talk” evokes its subject by taking on a personal, conversational tone.
Menaker draws on a wide array of sources — from Socrates to Samuel Johnson to Deborah Tannen — to explain how conversation has evolved and how it works — or doesn’t.
In keeping with his thesis that “it is you and I and other ordinary people who create the history of conversation, insofar as there is one,” most of Menaker’s conclusions and examples are drawn from his own life and career as a writer and editor for such outlets as the New Yorker and Random House.
His refreshingly honest anecdotes reveal the roles and risks we take in conversation. But since most of the reported talk ranges from career advice for young writers to a claim by legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn that a certain pun “would destroy the magazine,” Menaker’s book might not speak to readers uninterested in the world of East Coast literary elites.
The most useful section may be Menaker’s discussion of FAQs (Frequently Arising Quandaries), such as how to survive exchanges with dull people (ask about their top 10 books, movies, etc. or about any personal grudges) and how to recover from causing inadvertent affronts (don’t overapologize!).
His comments on e-communication are spot-on; he writes that cyberspace connections “take place noplace” and cautions that “an e-mail is forever. And forever forwardable and discoverable and litigable and revengeable and so on.”
This topic demands more probing, however: What does such a degradation of communication mean for us as a society? And how might we avoid further regression to the grunting state of our primate ancestors?
