Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Birth Families

  • Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited

    Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited

    by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein

    Elyse Schein had always known she was adopted, but it wasn’t until her mid-thirties while living in Paris that she searched for her biological mother. What she found instead was shocking: She had an identical twin sister. What’s more, after being separated as infants, she…

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  • Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    Reunited: An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life’s Greatest Family Mysteries

    by Pamela Slaton (with Samantha Marshall)

    In this poignant and heartwarming narrative, renowned genealogist Pamela Slaton tells the most striking stories from her incredibly successful career of reconnecting adoptees with long-lost birth parents. After a traumatic reunion with her own birth mother, Pamela Slaton realized two things: That she wanted to…

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  • Prison Baby: A Memoir

    Prison Baby: A Memoir

    by Deborah Jiang-Stein

    Even at twelve years old Deborah Jiang-Stein, the adopted daughter of a progressive Jewish couple in Seattle, felt like an outsider. Her multiracial features set her apart from her well-intentioned white parents, who evaded questions about her past. But when Deborah discovered a letter revealing…

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  • My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

    My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

    by Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair (translated by Carolin Sommer)

    This is the extraordinary and moving memoir of a woman who learns that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the brutal Nazi commandant depicted in Schindler’s List. When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea…

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  • The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    The Book of Sarahs: A Family in Parts

    by Catherine E. McKinley

    Catherine McKinley was one of only a few thousand African American and bi-racial children adopted by white couples in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Raised in a small, white New England town, she had a persistent longing for the more diverse community that would…

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  • Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    Songs of My Families: A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back

    by Kelly Fern with Brad Fern

    In 1971, Lee Myonghi, aged five, was taken from her family and placed in a Korean orphanage. Six months later, she was flown to the United States, where she and two other Korean girls were adopted by a Minnesota couple. They renamed her Kelly Jean.…

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  • The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    The Fifth and Final Name: Memoir of an American Churchill

    by Rhonda Noonan

    In a family memoir that reads like a detective novel, Rhonda Noonan recounts her thirty-year quest to find the truth of her own background–and what she uncovered will surprise readers as much as it did her. Rhonda was born and adopted in Oklahoma, a state…

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  • She Named You Donna

    She Named You Donna

    by Julie Kerton

    It’s a January morning in 1976; Julie rips the hospital bracelet from her wrist and throws it across the room. As it lands, she doesn’t know that the sound will echo through the years. But the story doesn’t begin here. In a suburb north of…

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  • Adoption Healing: A Path to Recovery–Articles, etc.

    Adoption Healing: A Path to Recovery–Articles, etc.

    by Joe Soll, LCSW

    This addition to the Adoption Healing series is a compilation of all the articles that I have been asked to write in the last year, plus more than a half dozen chapters with totally new material. The articles address specific issues faced by adoptees and…

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  • Adoption Healing: A Path to Recovery for Mothers Who Lost Children to Adoption

    Adoption Healing: A Path to Recovery for Mothers Who Lost Children to Adoption

    by Joe Soll, CSW, and Karen Wilson Buterbaugh

    The reader is provided with a description of the immaculate deception imposed on pregnant women and the ensuing tragedy of the loss of their babies to adoption and the profound effects on their lives. This is followed by different methods of healing the mother’s wounds,…

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  • The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated

    by Joyce Maguire Pavao

    Full of wonderful stories that give insight into a wide variety of adoption issues, now revised in light of recent developments, The Family of Adoption is a powerful argument for the right kind of openness in adoption. Joyce Maguire Pavao uses her thirty years of…

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  • Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    Split at the Root: A Memoir of Love and Lost Identity

    by Catana Tully

    In this memoir, the author explores questions of race, adoption, and identity, not as the professor of cultural studies she became, but as the Black child of German settlers in Guatemala. Her journey into the mystery that shrouded her early years begins in the US…

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  • Guide to DNA Testing: How to Identify Ancestors, Confirm Relationships, and Measure Ethnic Ancestry through DNA Testing

    Guide to DNA Testing: How to Identify Ancestors, Confirm Relationships, and Measure Ethnic Ancestry through DNA Testing

    by Richard Hill

    The price of some powerful new genetic genealogy tests has dropped below $100. Genealogists and adoptees are using them and other DNA tests to identify ancestors, confirm relationships, and measure their ethnicity. Unfortunately, there are many similar sounding tests and some of them have different…

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  • You Remind Me of Me

    You Remind Me of Me

    by Dan Chaon

    You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager…

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  • Adoption Reunion in the Social Media Age

    Adoption Reunion in the Social Media Age

    Edited by Laura Dennis

    This anthology gives voice to the wide experiences of adoptees and those who love them; examining the emotional, psychological and logistical effects of adoption reunion. Primarily adult adoptee voices, we also hear from adoptive parents, first moms and mental health professionals, all weighing in on…

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  • Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama

    by Marianne Novy

    Explores the ways in which novels and plays portray adoption, probing the cultural fictions that these literary representations have perpetuated. Through careful readings of works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Albee and others, Marianne Novy reveals how fiction has contributed…

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  • The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption

    by Kathryn Joyce

    Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of reproductive rights, pitched as a “win-win” compromise in the never-ending abortion debate. But as Kathryn Joyce makes clear in The Child Catchers, adoption has lately become even more entangled in the conservative Christian agenda. The Child…

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  • Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (3rd edition)

    Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (3rd edition)

    by Betty Jean Lifton

    The first edition of Betty Jean Lifton’s Lost and Found advanced the adoption rights movement in this country in 1979, challenging many states’ policies of maintaining closed birth records. For nearly three decades the book has topped recommended reading lists for those who seek to…

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  • The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    The Adoption Triangle (reissue)

    by Arthur D. Sorosky, M.D., Annette Baran, M.S.W., and Reuben Pannor, M.S.W.

    A classic and the first to deal with how sealed and open records affect adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. Originally published in 1978,” … it is as true and open as the changes advocated … comprehensive, factual, forward looking, totally honest, readable and thoughtful…

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  • The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

    by Ann Fessler

    In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before…

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  • Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

    Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

    Edited by Janine Myung Ja, Michael Allen Potter, and Allen L. Vance

    This anthology begins with personal accounts and then shifts to a bird’s eye view on adoption from domestic, intercountry and transracial adoptees who are now adoptee rights activists. Along with adopted people, this collection also includes the voices of mothers and a father from the…

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  • A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption

    A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption

    Edited by Susan Ito and Tina Cervin

    Sixty short stories and poems reveal the sometimes heartbreaking, often affirming tales of adoption. Written from the point of view of birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees, this unique anthology spans nations and cultures. Editors: Susan Ito, Tina Cervin Adoptee Authors: Mi Ok Song Bruining, Lisa Buchanan,…

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