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Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States reviewed by Karen Balcom - June 24, 2009 Title: Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States Author(s): Ellen Herman Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago ISBN: 0226327604, Pages: 368, Year: 2008 Search for book at Amazon.com With a number of important articles and an innovative web project to her credit, Ellen Herman is a well-established leader in adoption history.1 In the preface to this highly anticipated book, Herman notes that working with other scholars in this field has convinced her of "the potential of adoption to illuminate basic questions in the humanities and social sciences in utterly original ways" (p. xi). Or, to quote Herman in another context (2005), "adoption is good to think with. In Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States, Herman follows this lead and uses the history of adoption in the twentieth century an important and complex story in its own right to think about the advance of governmentality and therapeutic culture in the United States, and to illuminate what she calls "shadow stories" at the heart of democratic liberalism (p. 8).
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- Karen Balcom
McMaster University E-mail Author KAREN BALCOM is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her research is on the history of transnational adoption to and from Canada and the United States. Her book, The Traffic in Babies: Cross-Border Adoption and Baby-Selling Between the United States and Canada, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.
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