Customer Reviews

Birthmarks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The power of this book is in the stories of the adoptees the author interviews. Their life stories answer some of the most pressing questions there are about transracial adoption, including their experiences with racism and their struggles to make sense of who they are. This is a book all adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents should read. Yet the stories are engaging and relevant for all readers interested in questions of family and identity. Patton lays bare the process of developing a sense of self in a race-conscious society. But there is more. The author lets the adoptees speak and then puts their words into a larger framework of social analysis. She also includes attention to media and policy issues about adoption and single mothers. Her perspective on the connections between welfare legislation and adoption policy are incisive and chilling. A must read!

This book is well written and an asset to someone interested in learning about transracial adoption POLICY AND THEORY(which also implies issues of welfare reform, illegitimacy, and institutional race/classism)from W.W. II to the 1990's. The author, herself an adoptee, interviewed 22 transracial adoptees (primarily Mid West and West Coast) and has included some of their comments in the text.
Personally, I was seeking more of a "Field Guide" of difficult situations that prospective transracial adoptive parents or the adoptees might encounter and HOW to engage those issues in a proactive and sensitive manner. This was an interesting read (like a graduate student's thesis about institutional racism), but not quite what I was looking for.

Patton is all over the place in this book. She tries to cover too many really huge issues and therefore misses the mark completely. She loses focus on what her real issue is and ultimately seems really confused. This book is not much more than a research paper. Patton doesn't cite references directly in the text, so I question where she got some of her statistics from because many of them seem unrealistic. The irony of the whole book is that the auther is a white woman who was adopted into a white family writing about black children adopted by white parents. Trans-ethnical and trans-racial are two different things. Judaism is not a race, it's a religion. All of this seems to elude Patton. Being married to a bi-racial, trans-racial adoptee, I feel more qualified to have written this book - and more accurately at that. I had to read this book for a class. I'm glad I didn't seek it out for factual, unbiased information.

i purchased this book for my daughter-in-law. We have 2 babies adopted from Ethiopia and she knew this would be a good book. She was very pleased Christmas morning.