Customer Reviews

My Father's House: A Life of Adoption

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By the time I finished reading this book -- memoir and essay intertwined -- I was electrified by the understanding, against the current of our current obsession with DNA, that the most powerful bonds between people are not biological. David Jones reveals that we must "adopt" even our own children, making a conscious commitment to them; that marriage is mutual adoption; that the United States is an adoptive nation, and that's what's so great about it; and that Christianity is a religion of adoption -- of one another as brothers/sisters -- and that's what's so great about it. This book has affirmed the sense I share with so many people that my dearest friends are quite literally as much "family" as my family, that those willingly forged, life-lasting bonds aren't "like" kinship, they are kinship. Jones tells the story of an unrelated older man whom he and his wife and kids adopted into their home, to be part of the family until (and beyond) death.

You may think the one person Jones has left out of the equation is his unknown birth mother. But towards the end, she too (though absent) enters into the story, and the family, in the most unexpected and poignant way. At this point, readers of My Father's House generally burst into tears.

Please read this wonderful book. It will change the way you look at just about everything. Not least, it is a much needed restorative of balance to an adoption debate overwhelmingly dominated by biologism. It will arm the conflicted adopted, seduced by the siren song of DNA at normal developmental rough spots in their lives, with the missing concept that will support that strand in their tangled feelings that recognizes their adoptive parents as their real parents.