Review by Choice Review
The importance of this book is that historian Choy (ethnic studies, Berkeley) found a great archive, and knows how to use it. Her book is based almost completely on the vast archive of the International Social Service, USA Branch--an international organization that facilitated migration, adoption, and other social services at the international level. Choy joins many recent scholars in aiming to move the adoption debate past the binaries in which it is lodged, at least in popular discourse: either "a progressive form of US multiculturalism" or "an exploitative form of cultural and economic imperialism." She also attempts to link adoption to histories of race, foreign relations, immigration, and labor. The analytical ground here is not new. Her book's strength is in the stories themselves, which Choy narrates with skill and sympathy. As a straight-up social history of adoption from the perspective of case files and other documents generated by the vast apparatus of social work, this book tells some painful, remarkable stories. A useful corrective to one-dimensional, romantic portraits of adoption that saturate popular culture today. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. K. Dubinsky Queen's University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
