Product Description
"He says you'll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been by remaining closed."

The messenger is a school janitor with a master's in art history who claims to be channeling "from both sides of the veil." "He" is Adam, a three-year-old who has never spoken an intelligible word. And the message is intended for Martha Beck, Adam's mother, who doesn't know whether to make a mad dash for the door to escape a raving lunatic (after all, how many conversations like this one can you have before you stop getting dinner party invitations and start pushing a mop yourself?) or accept another in a series of life lessons from an impeccable but mysterious source.

From the moment Martha and her husband, John, accidentally conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. They'd plotted out a future in the most vaunted ivory tower of academe. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them that if they decided to keep the baby, they would lose all hope of achieving their carefully crafted goals. Fortunately, that's exactly what happened.

Expecting Adam is a poignant, challenging, and achingly funny chronicle of the extraordinary nine months of Martha's pregnancy. By the time Adam was born, Martha and John were propelled into a world in which they were forced to redefine everything of value to them, put all their faith in miracles, and trust that they could fly without a net. And it worked.

Martha's riveting, beautifully written memoir captures the abject terror and exhilarating freedom of facing impending parentdom, being forced to question one's deepest beliefs, and rewriting life's rules. It is an unforgettable celebration of the everyday magic that connects human souls to each other.

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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 195 reviews)

Lovely and Strange

Expecting Adam is Martha Beck's engrossing memoir of her pregnancy with her second child, who has Down syndrome. She and her husband, John, both Ph.D. students at Harvard, decide to keep the baby, for reasons they can't at first articulate, and even though doing so goes against most of the values of their Ivy League community.

During the pregnancy, Martha and John experience deep transformations of their worldviews, values, and ambitions. Each also has numerous spiritual and paranormal experiences which they understand to be connected to their unborn child. Most of these experiences are so strange that for many months Martha and John don't even confide in each other.

The Harvard community Martha paints is bleak. Intellectual prestige and appearance are the supreme values. "Knowing a great deal is the norm and knowing everything is the goal, [but] appearing to know everything is considered an acceptable substitute." In order to survive in this culture, Martha consciously calls up a sort of alter ego, named Fang, before every visit to campus. Fang is fearless, aggressive, disdainful, and competitive.

Martha also paints a less than sympathetic view of the passionate feminists who apparently exist in large numbers at Harvard. After one public bout of morning sickness, Martha is approached by one such feminist, a stranger, who says, "I think it's time you stop kissing up to the enemy... This crap about -- what do they call it? -- morning sickness. You know it isn't real... All of those myths were made up to justify denying women access to decent jobs and positions in society... I don't care if you think you can help it or not... It makes us all look bad... Just stop it."

With the exception of a few amazingly supportive friends, this is the context and community in which Martha and John learn that the baby they are expecting has Down syndrome. Their community is often intolerant of healthy pregnancies, not to mention unhealthy ones. The Beck's are pressured on every side to abort -- by fellow grad students, professors, advisors, colleagues and medical professionals. Not to do so is considered both foolish and irresponsible.

These pressures are intensified by Martha's nearly constant "morning sickness" (actually an autoimmune disease not diagnosed until many years later), John's frequent absences due to consulting assignments in Asia, and the anxieties they both have about raising a mentally impaired child.

Martha and John find reassurance and strength in strange places. This is where the spiritual and paranormal experiences come in. They have visions, sometimes even "seeing" each other across continents. And they frequently sense the presence of spiritual beings who they believe speak to them, give them peace, orchestrate events in their favor, and in at least two instances save Martha from grave physical danger.

The ending of the story is never in doubt. Throughout her memoir Martha intersperses chapters about Adam after he is born. He is a beautiful child.

This book was an easy and engrossing read. I particularly enjoyed Martha's and John's transformation from a thin existence characterized by mindless striving, excessive individualism, emotional hunger, and disbelief in all things spiritual, to a thicker existence that was more human and allowed for (in fact, could not deny) a spiritual dimension to life.

I also appreciated Martha's instinctive sense of the vulnerability and humanity of her unborn child. At one point she describes an exchange between herself and her obstetrician, who pressures her to terminate her pregnancy:

"'I would not make the choice that you have made,' he went on steadily. 'I have never known anyone who would.' ...

'I don't know,' I mumbled. 'I guess I just... can't reject him.' It was a miserably inadequate statement. My real feeling, the one I couldn't articulate yet, was that my entire life hinged on knowing that there were people who would continue to love me unconditionally, even if I were damaged, even if I were sick. Such love was the only thing that had sustained me during the turmoil of the past months. If I eliminated my child because of his disability, if I put him out of my life, I would be violating the only thing that was keeping me alive. I'd be ripping the rug out from under my own feet."

In addition, I was touched by Martha's descriptions of life with Adam and the insights she gained because of him. For example: "I was afraid Adam would slow me down, and he has. Not because he has required more care and time than a 'normal' boy (he is the most helpful and least demanding of my children) but because the immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation." Another example: "[Adam] has taught me to look at things in themselves, not at the value a brutal and often senseless world assigns to them. As Adam's mother I have been able to see quite clearly that he is no less beautiful for being called ugly, no less wise for appearing dull, no less precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us."

I had a few disappointments with the book. First, I grew tired of reading about Martha's sickness and her seeming neglect of her own medical needs. I began to wonder how, if she was so sick, she kept up with her doctoral studies, mothered her two-year-old daughter, and kept the voluminous journal that she said she relied on to write her memoir more than 10 years after the fact.

I was also disappointed by Martha's misunderstanding of, and opposition to, the pro-life movement, notwithstanding her own profound experiences. She expresses puzzlement that religious people who possess "a devout belief in the life of the spirit" and a "belief that life exists outside of mortal bounds" are the same people who are "so obsessed with a fetus's 'right to life' on this messy little planet." What she doesn't understand is that such people (I include myself) are not devoted to some belief about the nature of spiritual life, but to God himself, the Author of life, who creates humans in his own image. Because he is the Author, that life is sacred and created for his purposes, not our own.

I also found myself wanting to better understand Martha's and John's spiritual experiences. I hoped that these obviously significant experiences would lead somewhere coherent. But Martha and John seemed content not to question, categorize, or define their experiences. Martha simply called the visions the "Seeing Thing" and the spiritual beings the "Bunraku puppeteers" (after a Japanese puppet show). Perhaps their attitude is understandable in view of the Mormon faith in which they each were raised and each abandoned. Nevertheless, their spirituality seems to turn into a free floating, New Age-ish, therapeutic sort of thing. When they conceived Adam, it was as if a door cracked open providing a way out of a harsh philosophic reductionism, but the door never leads anywhere coherent.

Lastly, as I hinted above, I had some doubts about the author's credibility. I wondered how a memoir like this, chock-full of details and verbatim dialogues, could be written so many years after the fact, even with the aid of a journal. I also began to wonder if Martha was prone to exaggeration and caricature. And I questioned the sheer number of strange voices, visions, presences, and events that she describes. After reading the book, I found some biographical information about Martha that, unfortunately, only added to my doubts about her credibility.

Nevertheless, this story was engrossing, moving, and enjoyable.
September 20, 2008

More on Fake Memoirs

This book was recommended by a writer-friend saying it was well written and an interesting read. I was sucked in by the writer for a few pages, but then decided to start listing all the inconsistencies and reality-defying events. By page 95, where I am now, I have 10 major ones listed. Then I remembered the lately discussion about Fake Memoirs and thought, hey lets see what the reviewers on Amazon say. I'm surprised at the large number of reviewers who believe this stuff actually happened as written. She might have gone to Harvard and might have a Down's syndrome kid, but after that, it pure fiction. Try imagine writing about what you had in the refrigerator on day 26 of vomiting 10 years later. But you have to give Ms. Beck credit for a vivid imagination; similar to a paranoid-compulsive nephew I know who can make up the most compelling fictitious event scenarios; way better than I can.
August 29, 2008

A compelling "different" kinda memoir

I was primed for this book. Our third grandson, Adam, had just been born (August 5), when I visited a bookstore just down the street from the hospital. So the title, Expecting Adam, quite naturally practically leapt off the shelf into my hands. I originally thought, what a great gift for my daughter (the new mother), but when I read it was a story about having a child with Down Syndrome, I reconsidered. Our particular Adam, although a few weeks premature, seemed pretty much perfect, and I didn't want to needlessly upset the new mom. I needn't have worried. This is an absolutely wonderful book, told with humor, compassion, wit, wisdom and a nearly other-worldy sense of wonder. And did I mention humor? Because this woman is a very funny writer. The numerous references to invisible beings, whether she calls them angels or Bunraku puppeteers, and intercontinental telepathy are the kind of thing that would normally put me off, as I am a natural skeptic. But somehow Beck pulls it off. Probably because she believes it, she makes me believe it too - all of it. My wife wants to read it now. (She'd seen Martha Beck on Oprah some time ago, she tells me.) We will then pass the book along to our daughter to read. We know she will relate, and probably cry a little, when she reads Beck's perfect descriptions of a tiny foot the size of a man's thumb and a head the size of an orange. Babies. Ain't they just the grandest things?! I'll say it again. This is a wonderful book. - Tim Bazzett, author of the ReedCityBoy trilogy
August 23, 2008

Taking it on faith

Read this book if: you are struggling with the belief that you must be perfect to be loved. I have read other Beck books. I especially liked Leaving the Saints. And like some of the other reviewers here, I occasionally pause, scratch my head, and say "can all of this stuff really happen to one person?"and "is it possible she is taking literary license with some of the details? And then I look at my own life, and I think, NO. If all of us told the truth of our own existence, the late night thoughts, the dreams, the spiritual experiences, we'd all sound like lunatics. These are the things we must share with each other and these are the things we don't share because we are afraid some "reviewer" will skewer us or smirk or otherwise besmirch our integrity and sanity. I loved this book. It brought me back to the power of my dreams and my connection with the divine. I thank Martha and Adam for the inspiration and love shared.
August 22, 2008

Much conjecture, and is the author sane?

As many have mentioned, Beck's story has very little to do with Adam, her son, and everything to do with the many miracles that she feels surrounded his gestation.

The assumption is that something very spiritual took place. I don't doubt that's true. But I found her position to be highly unbalanced.

Being the scholar that she is, I have to wonder how she wrote this memoir as "truth" when the subject matter cannot be proven.

The red flags are:

1) From A to Z this story is presented with *high emotion.*
2) While she was expecting Adam she was under tremendous stress.
-she was physically hampered by a difficult pregnancy compounded by an autoimmune disfunction (which she doesn't name).
-her academic requirements would have produced enough stress to put the Dali Lama on Prozac.
-she had very little family support
-she was caring for another child under the age of two.
-after her appartment building caught fire, when she claimed she and her toddler nearly died, she kept right on pushing herself to the extreme. She sought no psychological help for what must surely have been a traumatizing event.
-when her fears that "something was wrong" with her baby were confirmed, she kept pace with all her stress. She worked and studied and cared for her other child. It seems to me she took very little care for her physical and mental health.

Another thing to consider is that her other books are also questionable. A quick background check into the controversies surrounding her life and experiences suggests there is no middle ground present in this woman, only extremes. Her pendulums swing all the way to the right or left. They don't appear to rest anywhere in between. This has landed her in more than one sticky situation. Beck and former husband John once co-authored a book on abstaining from homosexuality. Today they are divorced and both are openly gay. She also wrote about leaving the Mormon church, where she accuses her father of molesting her. Her seven other siblings all contest her reportings, some were said to have shared a room WITH her and have no idea how molestation could have taken place without thier knowledge. Even John felt the need to respond to her portrayal of events, feeling they were inadequate and unfair. To date she's at odds with her family, her husband John (so highly represented in the book, they are now divorced) and the Mormon church of her upbringing. Controversy is to Martha Beck as ink is to paper.

By now this review sounds largely negative. Let me add that Martha's writing is stellar and extremely readable. Even believable. To the untrained eye, this is an amazing account.

If you, like me, have that niggling suspicion her perception of supernatural abetting may indeed be larger than life there is one question to be considered: Is the niggling doubt of a spiritual manifestation? Or could it merely be common sense...

I will close by mentioning that I too have kept journals of my experiences in life. Looking back I could easily assign spirituality as the sole benefactor of certain events. But it wouldn't be fair to present myself as though that were the ONLY cause of my life's outcomes. My choices and actions are part of the equation. One also has to wonder if Beck's perceptions were in any way altered by psychological (perhaps peri-partum depression? anxiety? Outright psychosis?) were in any way a factor in her view of what was happening inside (and outside) of her body at that time.

August 04, 2008

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live
by Martha Beck

Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith
by Martha Beck

The Four Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace
by Martha Beck

Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life, No Matter What!
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The Joy Diet : 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life
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