Melissa Fay GreeneReseñas

When the number of children hit nine, Greene took a break from reporting. She trained her journalist's eye upon events at home. Fisseha was riding a bike down the basement stairs; out on the porch, a squirrel was sitting on Jesse's head; vulgar posters had erupted on bedroom walls; the insult niftam (the Amharic word for "snot") had led to fistfights; and four non-native-English-speaking teenage boys were researching, on Mom's computer, the subject of "saxing." "At first I thought one of our trombone players was considering a change of instrument," writes Greene. "Then I remembered: they can’t spell." Using the tools of her trade, she uncovered the true subject of the "saxing" investigation, inspiring the chapter "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but Couldn’t Spell." A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening---No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy. Selected Reading Questionnaire.

Utterly fascinating look into the world of the civil rights movement in rural Georgia. I learned so much about this history you don't learn in school and how long and deep the roots are (good and bad) in this region.

I've kept this book only because it is about my hometown. The author seems to have been one of those persons who are sure they are right and incapable of appreciating or actually understanding anybody of a different background or viewpoint. I paricularly resent her supercilious treatment of a lady (not related to me).

An excellent book to read to learn about the AIDS epidemic in Africa ( this book's focus is Ethiopia).It mainly is one woman's story Haregewoin Teferra, a woman who does not plan to but winds up creating an orphanage as so many children lose both their parents to AIDS.

rabck from quiet orchid; the story of the 1958 Springhill Nova Scotia coal mine "bump" - I would call it a cave in. 174 miners were trapped and a group of 7 and a group of 12 miners were found alive. It was the beginning of "breaking news" journalism, which turned the episode into a fiasco. Author did a good job of bringing together the facts, including a bit of the history of this mine and the miners and their families. A good read

On October 23, 1958, a devastating "bump" occurred at the 13,400 foot level of a coal mine in Springhill, Nova Scotia, Canada. It killed or trapped 174 miners. This book starts with a history of coal mining in Nova Scotia and specifically Springhill and then describes the life of a coal miner and his family.

Greene did years of research including interviewing survivors, children of miners and wives of survivors and victims of the bump. Her descriptions of what the miners experienced during the seven to nine days they waited for rescue make for tough reading. This especially true of the miner whose arm was caught under huge timbers and rocks and could not be freed. Greene described how the experienced destroyed some of the men as they never attained their pre disaster personalities becoming poor fathers and husbands.

One unexpected topic the book covers, is the Segregation laws of Georgia and the American deep South. The survivors were given a free holiday on Jekyll Island in Georgia as a tourism promotion. Planning was well on the way when the Governor's assistant discovered there was a black miner in the group. The scrambling to solve this political nightmare for the Georgians makes for interesting reading.

While I was reading, it disturbed me that Greene had included conversations in quotation marks of what took place underground. In her end notes she answers my concern by explaining that the quotes are from transcripts of interviews that were done with the miners immediately after they were rescued.

This is a very complete description of the disaster by a woman from the State of Georgia.

Interesting read to learn about the history of rural Georgia. Needed a much more serious edit in the last half. Is this a New Classic? No.

Like some other readers, I was a little disappointed by some of Greene's more obvious emotional manipulations. Also, I was little annoyed that she didn't really reveal her own involvement in the story, beyond just that of a journalist, until at least halfway through the book. She spends more time than really makes sense defending herself against the claim of having failed to meet Haregewoin at the airport, which makes me wonder what else about their relationship she hasn't revealed. Overall,the is a heartwringer, pay-attention-to-this issue kind of book rather than a real study of the issue. Most of the history of Ethiopia and AIDS is fairly basic background, appropriate for the book's intended audience.

A very moving and informative book about the "4 Paws for Ability" service dog academy - specializing in training dogs for children with special needs and their families. The author goes into detail about the history of service dogs, the evolution of dogs in general, and the development of the practice of placing dogs specifically for children. As a family that has raised, trained, and worked with four Therapy Dogs it was interesting and heartwarming to read about the people and dogs that provide so much comfort, relief, and love to children and families in need. This is a MUST READ for anyone that loves dogs and understands their "special powers".

A truly moving insight

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book about overseas adoption so much, but I did. It was a personal, entertaining, poignant, funny, heart-wrenching, frustrating, charming, and funny learning experience....all the things that make parenthood and life worthwhile.

Both the author and the narrator did a great job with the rhythm and variation in the book.

Audio book narrated by Julie Fain Lawrence

Consumed by grief at the loss of her husband and oldest daughter, Haregewoin Teferra, a middle-class Ethiopian woman, finds solace in attending daily church services – regardless of denomination – and becomes known to other regular church-goers as a very devout woman. True relief eludes her, however, and she decides to ask the local Orthodox priest to be taken into seclusion, so she can spend her days living in a simple hut near the graves of those she loved. But before taking that final step Haregewoin makes the rounds of the churches where she had been welcomed. At the Catholic Church the director of their charity surprises her when he says that he and the priest has just been talking about Haregewoin that morning; the priest thought she might do a favor for him. Curious, she asks what she could possibly do for the priest. Well, there is a 15-year-old orphan, living on the streets; perhaps Haregewoin might be willing to take the girl into her home? A few weeks later they ask her to take in another teen; and then a pair of six-year-old girls. And in this way Haregewoin, without even knowing that she is at the center of a global health disaster and with no training or funding, begins to foster the AIDS orphans of Ethiopia.

Greene is a journalist and has clearly done extensive research. She writes Haregewoin’s story in a compassionate and balanced way, backed up with considerable information on the history of Ethiopia, its culture and religions, as well as the history of HIV/AIDS and the conflict between big pharmaceutical firms intent on profit and protecting their patents, vs. the poor of Africa and other Third World countries who are dying from the pandemic due to lack of medical care. For my own tastes, I wish she had concentrated on Haregewoin’s story, which I found compelling, sometimes frustrating, and mostly heart-warming. I was far less interested in a research piece on epidemiology. I believe Greene might have found a way to include some of this information without disrupting the personal story arc; for example, she could have opened each chapter with factoid bullet points, and put the detailed exposition in an appendix.

Still, the book is well-written and held my interest. Julie Fain Lawrence does a very good job narrating the audio version. I’m glad I had a text version as well, however, or I would have missed all the photographs.

This is a compelling story of miners who were trapped underground. In [Last Man Out] [Melissa Fay Greene] does an excellent job of capturing the emotions of those trapped as well as the families above ground. She also connects the political and economic climate of the time by telling the story of how these Canadian miners ended up connected to Georgia's fight for tourist dollars and caught experiencing segregation first hand. This is an emotional and well told story on many levels.

Award winning journalist Melissa Fay Greene and her husband already had four biological children when they decided to adopt a little boy from Bulgaria. Rather than accept the "empty nest" that their home threatened to become when the oldest children headed off to college, the couple kept adopting. The next child was a little girl from Ethiopia. By the time Greene and her husband were finished adopting, their family included a total of nine kids from three continents.

The Bottom Line: Melissa Fay Greene's writing style is approachable for most readers. She writes with humor, tenderness, and honesty as she covers both the joys and the challenges of raising a large family. Recommended for everyone interested in the study of families. Also, for potential adoptive parents.

For the complete review, including Book Club notes, please visit the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog.½

Having read Melissa Fay Greene book "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet" I was quite interested in finding out about the way she actually found the foster mother in Ethopia, who saved all these children.

It was a very good book, but some of the scientific, economic and political explanations went a bit over my head. My husband thoroughly enjoyed it and said he would give it at least 4.5 stars.½

Very good. fascinating look at a multi racial, multi cultural family.

Set in Ethiopa over the past 15 years with a cast of AIDS orphans and a private individual attempting to help them, this book reveals the challenges AIDS presents in the third world. Though she sometimes stumbles in her narrative and transitions, Greene does an admirable job of conveying the needs of the AIDS orphans she depicts. She is clearly very invested in the issue, having adopted one herself! I was particularly intrigued by the section on the possible role of African injection hygiene on the development and spread of AIDS. I guess i haven't been following the news, because I had never heard of this, but it is an intriguing theory. The development of her main character Haregewoin (from bereaved mother to adoptive mother to adoption advocate to activist) is interesting, though sometimes a bit two dimensional. I sort of wished that Haregewoin could keep to her early role and only try to help as many children as she could love.

Several other reviewers have mentioned the strengths of this book, and I mostly agree with them. Many of the anecdotes that Greene relates are funny, and well told. She is clear about the ongoing difficulties of parenting children adopted at older ages. Her personality comes through as being warm and friendly. On the other hand, the narrative is strongly anecdotal, without a strong connecting thread holding it together. She also seems to randomly throw in stories about her biological children so that they won't feel left out. (All of the children seem charming, and she is explicit that they gave permission for each story in the book.)

The reason I brought this down to 1 star is simple - child trafficking. I have adopted older children. I also worked at an adoption agency for 5 years, during which time I watched the Ethiopia program. It started strong, with lots of children being cleared for adoption and leaving the country. Then those children started telling stories that didn't match their paperwork. The US Embassy in Addis Ababa started asking questions. At this writing, there are no reputable agencies who continue to facilitate adoptions from Ethiopia. Too many children were trafficked, birth parents were deceived about where their children were going and why, too many questions about the people who "found" children for orphanages.

Four of Greene's children were adopted from Ethiopia, and each story has huge red flags all over it. The only time in the entire book that someone asks if they did wrong, she brushes it off as no big deal. She's wrong. Selling children is always a big deal. I'm amazed that a prize winning journalist is so clueless about the ethics of international adoption (she never mentions the subject, the controversies, the very real arguments that divide the field). I'm appalled that the mother of internationally adoption children wouldn't care about the ethics of the situation. I urge interested readers to consult websites like PEAR (Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform) and this blog post (http://scoopingitup.blogspot.com/p/considering-ethiopian-international-or.html) for the other side of this issue.

In some ways, this book is overambitious. The author attempts to tell three intertwined stories: AIDS in Africa/Ethiopia, one woman's efforts, and much more peripherally, the author's adoption of two Ethiopian children. However, these strands are not balanced and don't ultimately braid together in a satisfying and even way, though it's sufficient. Less well-executed is the narrative voice, which cannot find its genre--is it reportage, indignant essay, or fiction? It's not intended to be fiction, but the frequent interior monologues and statements about how people other than the author (who is also a character) feel and what they're thinking are incredibly jarring and decrease my belief in the story's veracity. They raise questions about Greene's assumptions. Since many of these putatively nonfictional passages rely on pathos, they're particularly intrusive. The audiobook version features swelling emo instrumental riffs at especially poignant moments, which was startling and annoying.

Someone must tell Greene that "lowly" does not have a primary meaning of "quietly" or "in a low voice," but "humbly." She uses it several times.

These criticisms aside, it's an engaging and maybe even important book, probably an accessible way to interest a book group in AIDS prevention and intervention in Africa.

Greene is a wonderful writer, mother and all around interesting person. This book had me from the get-go. Well written, very personal and honest. I loved it!

This is a rivetting story of a great mine disaster that became a miracle rescue operation. The author has captured the tension, drama, and elation as events unfold, day by day by day. The events of the trip to Georgia, where the hero of the bump was excluded from hotels and dinners because he happened to be black, has been told, and how he encouraged the others to go. A great story.

When Melissa Fay Greene was in her mid-forties and beginning to see the edges of the empty nest on her horizon, she wondered if she could squeeze one more child in before her child-bearing years were officially over. She and her criminal defense attorney husband, Donny, both felt like they weren't quite ready to give up the joys of parenting. As it turns out, while her child-bearing years were, in fact, over, her parenting years had only just begun. After much internet research and some freelance writing about the work of international adoption doctors, Melissa traveled to Bulgaria to meet the boy who would be her first adopted son, Jesse. But the couple didn't stop there, when her heart and her writing took her to Africa where she saw the far-reaching effects of the HIV/AIDS crisis leaving unfathomable numbers of both healthy and well children orphaned, Greene knew she and her family could make even more space for children who had no place to go.

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is jam packed with the trials of trying to create a family from children from around the globe, but it's packed with enough heart and humor that more than make up for the hardships. Greene balances her funniest family anecdotes with her more serious struggles to make her adopted children feel loved and appreciated without letting her biological children fall by the wayside as well as her fierce determination that her adopted children not lose touch with their original countries and cultures even as they live their new lives in the U.S. With a family so large and diverse, Greene often worries that she has traded in a family for just another group home where there's not quite enough love to go around, and not enough unity to constitute a family, but No Biking is proof-positive that, ultimately, those worries are unfounded.

Greene tells her story with honesty and manages to capture the individuality of each of her children and how they come together as a family all without ever succumbing to cheesiness. She captures the joy of a child at being welcomed into a new family but never oversimplifies the challenges of creating a new life for a child that once had a family or spent their entire childhood in an institution. By the end of the book, I was totally captured by this woman and her family who had the courage, determination, and more than enough love to spare to open their hearts and homes to children in need from across the globe and how even though it wasn't always easy, with love and a very good sense of humor they make their decidedly unique family work.

Absolutely loved this book. I hope that Ms. Greeene will continue to write more news about her amazing, "international" family. The stories of the kids' families in Ethopia were very poignant.

Greene tells the true story of a corrupt sheriff and an awakening African American community in McIntosh County, Georgia. What is so surprising is that the incidents occurred not in the 50s or during the traditional civil rights era but later, from the mid- to late-seventies and well into the eighties. The sheriff had such a hold on the community that the blacks who lived there, a majority of the population, accepted things as they were until one man stood up to it. The story is complicated and hard to relate in just a few sentences. One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the attention to detail and description. Greene has done an excellent job of catching the essence of so many small communities in rural Georgia. Most of them are not corrupt, and that is not what I mean - it's the descriptions of the towns, the land, and the people.

At some point parents are faced with the prospect of the "empty nest syndrome". Some parents deal with it by moving to a big city (like my husband and I did- don't worry though, we told the kids and gave them our new address), some take up new hobbies, and Melissa Fay Greene and her husband met the challenge by adopting children from Bulgaria and Ethiopia, as told in No Biking in the House Without a Helmet.

The Samuels (Don is a criminal defense attorney, Melissa a writer) had four children, and their oldest of four Molly was heading off to college, when Melissa began to think what life would be like when they weren't bringing cupcakes, providing emergency phone numbers, or giving standing ovations at the school play.

The introduction to the book is hilarious, with Greene recounting her son answering the telephone and yelling "Daddy, it's for you! I think it's a criminal!" Another funny anecdote concerns Greene "helping too much with homework", and groaning "when the teacher's memo (for the science fair project) comes home, glancing at my calendar to see when I'll have time to get it done." When her sixth-grade son's friend calls late at night, she tells him "Lee's asleep. But what did you get for "How does Montesquieu show that self-interest can overawe justice in human affairs?" Lee came home a few days later and informed his mother that she got a 74 on that homework.

After having a miscarriage, adoption is discussed. Greene gets on her computer and finds several adoption websites where you can see photos of children available for adoption.
"Some adoption agencies offered "delivery." You could adopt without leaving your desk! "I'd better be careful not to hit accidentally hit Send," I told Donny. "We could open the door one day and find some little kid standing there with a suitcase."
While Greene writes with warm humor, she also writes movingly of her travels first to Bulgaria and later to Ethiopia to bring home two children. She is honest about the challenges faced bringing into their family children who didn't speak English.

She inspired her oldest son Lee, and he spent one summer volunteering in the same orphanage from where they got Helen. That chapter of the book was so lovely, this bright, caring young man sharing his talents and time with these kids who adored him. Greene was a little too inspiring though, and Lee called home and asked his parents to take in two older boys who had no one else, and whose chances for adoption were small.

The Samuels are a normal family; they love, they laugh, the fight. They went through a particularly bumpy time for awhile when two of the teenage boys were literally fighting and it affected the entire family.

Greene is a wonderful writer: honest, empathetic and funny. I fell in love with the Samuel family, no more so than when one of their biological children bemoaned the fact that if they adopted two more Ethiopians he would move farther down the list as fastest runner in the family.

This is a beautiful book, a testament to the strength of a loving family, with all the laughs and frustrations that being part of that family entails.