The Adoption Life Cycle: The Children and Their Families Through the Years

Many of the growing number of books about adoption are essentially how-tos, guiding prospective adoptive parents through the emotional and legal thickets adoption requires. Rosenberg, a family therapist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, has written a more unusual work: a careful, scholarly examination of the psychological relationships involved in the strange three-way partnership of child, birth parents and adoptive parents. Each party, she points out, has its own set of priorities and anxieties, and she addresses these with imagination and empathy (she might have included more case studies, however, in order to enliven and humanize her work). Rosenberg also illuminates changing social attitudes toward adoption, from secretiveness to cheery optimism to the current state of anxiety about being completely fair to all parties--an impossibility given the highly conflicted nature of the process itself. She thoughtfully raises many seldom-aired questions with insight and candor. (Aug.)