family health

This is a great book if this is your first pregnancy, and you want to be reassured that whatever your OB tells you is God's Absolute Truth and that all you have to do is trust the men and women in the white coats and they'll take care of you and do what's in your baby's best interest.

I read this book with my first pregnancy and ended up allowing myself to be induced early, and had a "perfect" but disappointing birth. Go ahead, buy this book, but also buy Our Bodies Ourselves (or some of the other books recommended), to get the other half of the story. With my second baby I had the courage to wait until she was actually *due* (not when the doctors said she was) and had a *much* more satisfying birth.

Doctors and hospitals want you to abide by their rules, which is fine, if you think you want to give up control of what could be the most important event of your life. This book will help you be at ease with this mentality. But please, don't consider this the Bible of how to be pregnant and give birth, because it will come up short.

This is a great all-around baby book for first-time Moms and Dads, from month-by-month developmental charts to when to call the doctor and when to relax and wait. Best alternatives are Sears and Leach, or you can pick from conservative to liberal books on child behavior or books on Dads or single parenting. My favorite recent book on parenting is "I Sleep At Red Lights: A True Story of Life After Triplets," by Bruce Stockler, which captures the incredible chaos, joy, anxiety and humor in being a parent--and making priorities. Also loved Annie Lamott's "Operating Instructions" (although some women I know object to her bizarre background.)

We are halfway through our first pregnancy. Four months ago, we bought this book, along with Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn (Simkin) and Your Pregnancy Week-by-Week book (Curtis). Of the three, we like Simkin's book best, and Curtis's book the least. The What to Expect book, while not as informative as the Simkin's book, is in our opinion very good.

Many of the things the other reviewers said about this book are true: the authors' diet suggestions border on the fanatical (it seems as if they are writing for obese parents-to-be), and the tone of the book is definitely patronizing. The amount of knowledge about the biological aspects of pregnancy is also minimal---the book is very light on technical terms and diagrams.

However, if you click on the image of the book at the top of the screen, you will notice a sentence that highlights the strongest point of the book: "...reassuringly answers the concerns of mothers- and father-to-be." We couldn't agree more.

Several times throughout the pregnancy, my wife has had various symptoms that, while quite normal, were alarming for a first-time pregnant couple. Neither of the other two books said very much about these symptoms, but the What to Expect book reassuringly and accurately helped us evaluate whether the symptoms were anything to worry about. Examples are: Is extreme fatigue a sign of danger? Are nosebleeds anything to worry about? What about abdominal cramps during the second trimester? In most cases, the What to Expect was the best book of the three, allowing us to quickly find these concerns in the index, and read about them at length.

Most importantly, the What to Expect book described the symptoms in sufficient detail to allow us to distinguish them from the truly serious.

In short: there are many problems with this book. The month-by-month organization is not very useful, and there just isn't very much information about the biological aspects of pregnancy (Simkin's books provide that information very well). Sometimes, though, some of us just need to put that little bit of worry in our heads to rest. And this book helped us do just that.

On a side note, I noticed that many reviewers accused this book of being alarmist. I found that the Curtis book was much more alarmist than the What to Expect book. Curtis's book might as well be named "What Could Be Wrong with Your Pregnancy Week-by-Week." The What to Expect book at least groups the most fear-inspiring stuff towards the end, in a separate chapter.