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The "slyly ironic, frequently hilarious"(Time) memoir about angels, academics, and a boy named Adam...
A national bestseller and an important reminder that life is what happens when you're making other plans.
Put aside your expectations. This "rueful, riveting, piercingly funny" (Julia Cameron) book is written by a Harvard graduate--but it tells a story in which hearts trump brains every time. It's a tale about mothering a Down syndrome child that opts for sass over sap, and it's a book of heavenly visions and inexplicable phenomena that's as down-to-earth as anyone could ask for. This small masterpiece is Martha Beck's own story--of leaving behind the life of a stressed-out superachiever, opening herself to things she'd never dared consider, meeting her son for (maybe) the first time...and "unlearn[ing] virtually everything Harvard taught [her] about what is precious and what is garbage."
"Beck [is] very funny, particularly about the most serious possible subjects--childbirth, angels and surviving at Harvard." --New York Times Book Review
"Immensely appealing...hooked me on the first page and propelled me right through visions and out-of-body experiences I would normally scoff at." --Detroit Free Press
"I challenge any reader not to be moved by it." --Newsday
"Brilliant." --Minneapolis Star-Tribune
- Sales Rank: #849195 in Books
- Published on: 2000-08-01
- Released on: 2000-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.26" h x .86" w x 5.46" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Amazon.com Review
Expecting Adam is an autobiographical tale of an academically oriented Harvard couple who conceive a baby with Down's syndrome and decide to carry him to term. Despite everything Martha Beck and her husband John know about themselves and their belief system, when Martha gets accidentally pregnant and the fetus is discovered to have Down's syndrome, the Becks find they cannot even consider abortion. The presence of the fetus that they each, privately, believe is a familiar being named Adam is too strong. As Martha's terribly difficult pregnancy progresses, odd coincidences and paranormal experiences begin to occur for both Martha and John, though for months they don't share them with each other. Martha's pregnancy and Adam (once born) become the catalyst for tremendous life changes for the Becks.
Focusing primarily on the pregnancy but floating back and forth between the present and recent and distant past, Martha Beck's well-written, down-to-earth, funny, heart-rending, and tender book transcends the cloying tone of much spiritual literature. Beck is trained as a methodical academician. Because of her step-by-step explanation of her own progress from doubt to belief, she feels like a reliable witness, and even the most skeptical readers may begin to doubt their senses. When she describes an out-of-body experience, we, too, feel ourselves transported to a pungent, noisy hawker center in Singapore. We, too, feel calming, invisible, supporting hands when she falls. Yet, whether or not readers believe in Beck's experiences is ultimately a moot point. There is no doubt that Adam--a boy who sees the world as a series of connections between people who love each other--is a tremendous gift to Beck, her family, and all who have the honor of knowing him. --Ericka Lutz
From Kirkus Reviews
Wickedly funny and wrenchingly sad memoirs of a young mother awaiting the birth of a Down syndrome baby while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. Sociologist Beck, now a columnist for Mademoiselle and a regular on the television show Good Day Arizona, became pregnant with her second child in September 1987, a time she and her husband now refer to as ``the month It All Went To Hell.'' To put it mildly, the unexpected pregnancy complicated their busy lives and academic careers. At the time, Beck kept a voluminous and detailed journal of her thoughts, conversations, and experiences, which provided the basis for these memoirs. Early in the pregnancy, Beck began having paranormal experiences that took auditory, visual, and tactile form. In what she refers to as ``the Seeing Thing,'' she would see brief, vivid images of where her husband was on his frequent trips to Asia. Calming voices spoke to her (and to her husband) in times of stress, and invisible helpers rescued her and her young daughter from a burning building. A Mormon turned atheist, Beck cannot explain the presence of comforting spiritual beings during her pregnancy, but she accepts them as real. Once Adam was delivered, she no longer felt ``like the focus of all that magic.'' Adam himself became the source of magic in her life, teaching her values unlike those she had learned at Harvard. In her son she sees wisdom, beauty, and a way of looking at the world that is astonishing and joyous. Besides a sense of humor that pokes as much fun at herself as anyone, Beck has both a sharp eye and a sharp tongue. Her portraits of Harvard academics, omniscient doctors, and uptight in-laws are priceless. Even skeptics will find magic in this story, and parents of a Down syndrome child will cherish it. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“Immensely appealing…hooked me on the first page and propelled me right through visions and out-of-body experiences I would normally scoff at.”--Detroit Free Press
�
“I challenge any reader not to be moved by it.”--New York Newsday
"Expecting Adam is Martha Beck's meticulously written, uplifting, and compassionate account of being gifted with a retarded son who opens her heart to the deep intuitions that love can bring."�� --Judith Orloff, M.D., author of Second Sight
"Set half in Harvard and half in heaven, Expecting Adam is a tough-minded yet tender-hearted book of spiritual discovery--a rueful, riveting, piercingly funny, thoroughly modern and deeply old-fashioned memoir. In short, a book to be reckoned with."������--Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way
"I can't believe I almost didn't read this book. The thing is, I thought it was about a lady who had a baby with Down Syndrome. This is like saying ANNA KARENINA is a book about a lady who commits suicide. In fact, this book is about matters so important and yet so totally way-out that I would accept no one but a comic genius with seven years at Harvard under her belt telling me about them. That's Martha Beck: funny, companionable, razor-sharp, down-to-earth, and onto the Big Secrets of Life Itself. Anyone considering having a child should have to read this book. It has changed some of my thinking about pregnancy and about children with disabilities, and I don't think it's too much to say it could change my life."������
--Marion Winik, author of First Comes Love and The Lunchbox Chronicles
"Expecting Adam��is not one of those grit-your-teeth, lemons-into-lemonade sagas that leave the reader feeling more besieged and guilty than the writer. It is a long hymn, from a practical woman caught flatfooted by amazing grace. Martha Beck is a celebrant skeptics can trust."������
--Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Most Wanted��and The Deep End of the Ocean
"I laughed. I cried. I couldn't put it down. I didn't want it to end. I wish I knew Adam and his family--and of course I do. A brave, uplifting, life-transforming book."���� --Sophy Burnham, author of A Book of Angels
"With uncommon sense and dependable wit, Martha Beck unravels every assumption about the meaning of life, choice, love--and the wisdom of pursuing happiness through any of the usual routes. If Expecting Adam raises suspicions among more rational readers that Martha Beck is slightly crazy, it raised my hopes that I'd catch it from her."���� --Mary Kay Blakely, author of American Mom
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Alot of hyperbole here
By Long term customer
This is the story of a woman's spiritual awakening after learning she will give birth to a disabled child. We see Ms Beck's transformation as she becomes open�to the�miraculous, seeing the hand of "God" in�difficult circumstances. While some of it is touching, a lot of it seems contrived and disingenuous. To be fair, such experiences are highly subjective, especially under extreme emotional and physical duress, as Ms Beck was undergoing at the time. I can accept this and suspend my credulity up to a point. The trouble is, 99% of my supernatural experiences, as I experienced them, wouldn't make for an interesting book, because they consisted of God quite plainly directing me to do the dishes, vacuum, go to work and take out the trash. From that perspective, I find some of Ms Beck's descriptions disturbing and even weird.
Ms Beck engages in a near�constant and hypocritical diatribe against Harvard throughout the work. It is hypocritical because Ms Beck wants to both denigrate the school, and get intellectual credit for going there.�Which is it? The book would be vastly improved by removing 90% of the Harvard references, but then it would be a short book.�Readers are subject to page after page after silly page emphasizing various negative stereotypes about the culture at Harvard. Everyone is a pseudo-intellectual, perfection is the only reasonable goal, there is no humanistic element, it is all cold, hard and calculated pressure. An ardent feminist supposedly chided poor Martha for her pregnancy related nausea, saying that nausea and pain in childbirth are myths invented by evil men to oppress women.� Do you believe this really happened? I do not. Then, upon hearing mention of a "Smurf", and allegedly being unfamiliar with the cartoon, the classmates�all pretended to know of the eminent "Dr Smurf". That anecdote may be true, or more likely�it isn't. One thing I know is not true is her description of the Winter Session.
Almost midway through the memoir, Ms Beck launches into a specific description of the true horrors of Harvard, tortures no doubt invented by those�joyless Puritans centuries ago. Unlike every other college in the country, according to Ms Beck, Harvard doesn't finish it's fall semester with exams a few days before Christmas. No, the exams are given in January, forcing students to forego a relaxed holiday at home, making them lug all their books for further study and more pressure, pressure, pressure. Except none of this is true. Harvard, like many schools, has a Winter Session, a 2 week optional enrichment class in January.�According to their website, past�course titles have included things such as " Yoga Laughter" and " Conversations in Wining and Dining". Sounds heavy, no? According to their published academic calendar, their fall semester exams are given in mid-December. Who are we to believe?
The book has some redeeming qualities. There are some moving moments here, such as when her husband John meets with his esteemed mentor, who tells him they should abort their child. John has a vision, for lack of a better word, of the professor as a hamster in a cage and as a mortal and finite being who is destined to die someday. Ms Beck did a good job of describing this scene, without making it sound too wacky and hard to believe. Unfortunately, the book is uneven in its' descriptions.
At the time this book was published nearly 20 years ago, angels were a big fad, which has since dissipated. Ms Beck undoubtedly capitalized�on�it�with the help of her publisher, as she has admitted the story of her pregnancy was fictionalized. She is now quite a wealthy woman and identifies as gay. Martha Beck has had a lot of epiphanies in her life and at times she writes well. But please do not take this book too seriously, if you actually read the entire thing.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
BS as non-fiction
By Lena Robinson
I was sucked into this book thinking that Beck's over-the-top descriptions had some connection to truth, as it is categorized as "non-fiction." Turns out a little research reveals that Beck was unable to peddle this as fiction (as she originally tried) and found success calling this real. Even believers in supernatural or otherworldly things should raise eyebrows as the things she passes off as true. Never mind the hands and the voices; this woman embellishes everything. I urge any reader to Google Martha Beck and judge for yourself if a woman with her history has any credibility in the "I see dead people" genre.
This book is downright manipulative. I gave her the benefit of the doubt initially, allowing her to attempt to set herself up as credible before she began with the crazy talk. I share her distaste for the over-intellectualized pretentious Harvard types, but she beat that dead horse like nothing I've ever seen. But what really frosted my rump was that she clearly hates everything about Harvard, yet uses her degrees over and over and over when it suits her. For instance, if you look at her own bios in various online locations, her Harvard pedigree is peddled prominently. Hypocrisy at its finest.
I also find her baring her soul in the book to be not only tiresome, but riddled with selective memory. For instance, she never disclosed that her husband had told her he was gay before they married. That little nugget would've been helpful to know during the part when he tells her he almost left her. She spun it like it was all because of her attitude about the impending birth. Nonsense. They have since divorced and are now with other people: He's now living as a gay man, and she's now a lesbian.
There were many other parts in the book that are clearly exaggerated or lies, and they didn't have to be. Sticking to the truth would've worked just fine and still conveyed her points. For instance, she refers to books by name in the Harvard Coop. I forget what the titles were, but they were absurdly titled. She didn't say it was a joke or embellished. There are no such books in existence and never were. One might think that's a small thing to take issue with, but I think it's indicative of how willing she is to create facts to make her story more compelling, small and big. That's called lying.
I have so many other criticisms of her book, but I doubt that people will read this review if it's any longer! The bottom line is that I can't enjoy a book when it's billed as "a true story" but nothing about it rings true.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Opening up to the miraculous
By Amazon Customer
I loved this book insanely.
It's about transforming from a person-who-has-it-all-figured-out to a person who opens up to the miraculous.
"We will all be less hurt by opening--opening our hopes, our delights, our sorrows, our shattered and reborn dreams--than we will if we remain closed."
And here's why:
"Angels, or for that matter any forms of goodness, function like water; they run into any opening they are given."
I highly identified with over-valuing of intellect, planning and will-power...and then all of that changing in the face of life crisis. It is crisis that teaches us what really matters. It also opens doors to rooms we didn't even know existed.
As she began to trust herself to make a new life, "Some people told me I'd thrown my life away. They were right. But the life I threw away never fit me well... In the [new] life ... everything was transmuted into its opposite: grief turned out to be joy wearing a flimsy mask; danger turned into deep security; disability became genius; and death, the ultimate catastrophe, shimmered, shifted, and showed itself as just another sort of birth."
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