Reviews

"Ann Hulbert's book is that rarest of things-a really intelligent, sophisticated, and knowledgeable book about childrearing. She tells the fascinating, complicated, and often surprising story of a distinctively American phenomenon-the child-raising expert. By weaving together the histories of the men who gave advice and the women who took it (or didn't), she provides an important corrective to the simplicities of the typical 'baby books'. More, her subtle and wide-ranging knowledge of the science, history, and politics of child-rearing provides real insight into the dilemmas individual parents, and the nation, face today."
-Alison Gopnik, coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn"
"Ann Hulbert's unfailing generosity and kindness toward experts, parents, and children alike result in a book of incisive ideas as well as wonderful stories about raising children. Raising America immeasurably enhances our ability to understand the mixture of our own confusions and good intentions, both as parents and as veterans of our family pasts."
-Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns
"Ann Hulbert is one of the most astute observers of American cultural mores. She casts a discerning eye on our peculiar reverence for child-rearing experts. Over the last century American children have been unwitting research subjects, their parents the researchers, with the experts offstage writing the scripts on how to raise better if not perfect children. The story she tells is at once touching and troubling. Nobody does this better."
-Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy
"Were I to recommend one book to a newparent, it wouldn't be a how-to manual, but rather Ann Hulbert's diverting and thoroughly illuminating study, Raising America . . . . It's a fine-grained survey of all the major American child-rearing experts, but it's also something more: a kind of secret history of the times, laying out the symbiosis between the growing culture of expertise and parental anxiety."
-Steven Metcalf, "The New York Observer
"Lucidly written . . . thought-provoking . . . Not merely an account of a "century of advice" but also a history of the ways in which our ideas about families, women, childhood and adult responsibility have and have not shifted over the course of a hundred years. Hulbert's achievement is to examine our hopes and fears as they are played out in the lives of our children and to understand how we have come to determine the proper time to pick up a crying baby."
-Francine Prose, front cover, "L.A. Times Book Review
"Raising America is a generation-by-generation history of advice, and the joy of this book is in how successfully Hulbert renders the taste and smell of the circus. Here are the same kinds of runaway and pediatric best-sellers as we have today . . . the same folksy Dr. Feelgoods. . ."
-Sandra Tsing Loh, "The Atlantic Monthly
"Provocative and informative . . . a model of lay scholarship . . . Here is the story of how Drs. Hall and Holt begat Drs. Gesell and Watson, who begat Dr. Spock and even Dr. Seuss, and how they in turn spawned an entire mini-industry of parenting experts . . . With a flair for wordplay and a taste for irony, Hulbert documents the upbringings of the experts themselves, the fluctuations in their advice and the details of theirdownfalls."
-"Publishers Weekly
"Hulbert could hardly have taken on a more ambitious assignment, and for the most part she succeeds beautifully. She has fit her prodigious material around five of the century's conferences on childhood, focusing on the generations of experts who have guided us through this increasingly materialistic, increasingly meritocratic and increasingly messy business. . . Her history is fascinating as it reflects the tensions and anxieties of a century."
-Stacy Shiff, front cover, "New York Times Book Review
"I commend Phil Hilts for this important work. It deserves to be read by every American concerned about the quality of health care in our society and the protection of families from food and pharmaceutical products that could jeopardize their health."
--Senator Ted Kennedy
"Phil Hilts has written a compelling history of one of the most important, but least appreciated, institutions in America. The writing is crisp and the narrative enlivened with telling anecdotes and colorful characters. This is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the history of public health in America."
-- Congressman Henry Waxman