[S7C]≡ [PDF] Gratis The Hatbox Baby Carrie Brown 9780425184653 Books

The Hatbox Baby Carrie Brown 9780425184653 Books

Download As PDF : The Hatbox Baby Carrie Brown 9780425184653 Books

The Hatbox Baby Carrie Brown 9780425184653 Books

I loved this book. There is so much in here that is historically accurate about the baby project. This is so much more than just a story.

This book discusses a love story, a story about a premature baby and a murder as well as a mom who had the baby and is trying to find her husband. It is written in such a graceful way that twines everything together.

I was mesmerized by this book, struggling with the emotions that people thought these tiny beings were "freaks" or not deserving of being alive. I struggled to think of the anguish their mothers must have felt to give them up to give them a chance to live. The doctor was not lauded as a hero but as a monster by some for daring to "exhibit" human beings. (These babies were loved by the people caring for them, they were not made to perform.)

There are so many different facets going on in this book that it should be disjointed, but it is woven in such a way that it works for the story.


Tags : The Hatbox Baby [Carrie Brown] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. A baby born three months early is brought to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 by his father,Carrie Brown,The Hatbox Baby,Berkley Trade,042518465X,Literary,Chicago (Ill.);Fiction.,Physician and patient;Fiction.,Premature infants;Fiction.,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - Historical,Fiction-Literary,GENERAL,Health & Fitness General,Historical - General,LiteratureClassics,Literature: Classics,Pediatricians,Physician and patient,Premature infants,Century of Progress Internatio,Chicago (Ill.),Infants (Premature)

The Hatbox Baby Carrie Brown 9780425184653 Books Reviews

This book was fascinating. I recommend it to everyone I know who likes to read. Similar to Doctorow's Ragtime. At least I kept thinking of Ragtime.
It's very well written.
A really good story with characters and situations that stay with you! Set in a real life 'f'antasy' time and place. The Chicago Worls Fair, full of oddities, set down in the REAL depression era. I love this story and wish someone would put in on the stage!
I bought this book because I am very interested in both neonatology and the 1933 Chicago World Fair. I must say Ms Brown did her research well and her portrayal of the physicians and nurses was very accuarate. We do have a passion for little people. My complaint is the way the book evolves in the the last few pages. Then the book just stops. I turned the page and there were the acknowledgements. Did Ms Brown's computer breakdown or something? The book is now circulating around the NICU and most everybody feels the same way. People say "Don't tell me the ending" Those of us who have read it say "what ending?"
I really fell in love with this book. It was a cross between Geek Love and The Ciderhouse Rules (two of my favorite books). It was odd and sad and beautiful at the same time. I just liked the idea of living amoung the people at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933 when things that we take for granted now were just being discovered. The author did a great job of putting you right on those streets in that era with characters you start to really to care about.
Some people complained about the ending and I can kind of see their point. There is not a lot of resolution but if you read it just to go on a trip into the strange and awesome world of carnivals and the people who inhabit them you will love the ride.
The World's Columbian Exposition is the setting for this historical novel dealing with the first incubators for babies. The only funding for their development involved displaying them at carnivals or amusement parks and charging money to see them, with the babies in them. There was a lot of controversy over their use in this manner. In the story, a young father brings his premature baby to the Exposition in a hat box, because it's the only way to get it there, and the only chance it has for survival.
Carrie Brown's evocative "The Hatbox Baby" takes readers back to a time when premature infants were little more than sideshow attractions and the people who cared for them heroically fought against their own damaged self-images. This is a novel whose manifest belief in the innate goodness of human beings never wavers but is constantly tested, first by an artificial, illusory environment and subsequently by the characters' humbling self-doubt, and eroded sense of self-worth. Through Brown's quiet but compelling narrative and her compelling depiction of the decent, conflicted characters who drive the story, "The Hatbox Baby" engages, informs and inspires.

Set in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, the novel captures the contradictory, artificial and transitory qualities of an exposition which extols the possibilities of the future while existing in a city crippled by the ravages of the Great Depression. Dr. Leo Hoffman, whose "infantorium" permits the paying public to gawk at premature babies whose only chance for life depends on his selfless commitment, is acutely aware of the fair's "tragic, doomed population of itinerants and freaks, its tricks of light." He is not deceived by "its furious, breakneck demonstration of scientific witness and victory." Despite its avowal of "progress," the fair never answers Hoffman's unspoken, angry query "See? See what we have accomplished?" Though the fair's stated purpose is to extol applied science and technological possibilities, those who attend are invariably drawn to its more prosaic, seedier attractions.

Hoffman's forsaken children share the same midway as exotic fan dancer, Caroline Day. After men satisfy their erotic yearnings staring at the exquisitely-shaped Caroline, they may choose to balm their consciences by accompanying their women companions next door to stare at the silent, struggling sufferings of premature babies. This discord between perverse observation and altruistic service, between the tawdry and the truly beautiful, between illusion and reality, resonates throughout the novel.

Nowhere does the conflict between the grotesque and the transcendent rage with more fury than it does in the character of St. Louis, the misshapen semi-dwarf cousin of Caroline. Abandoned by his own mother after a premature delivery, St. Louis (named after the city and not the saint) yearns to change his essential being. "Could ugliness, the miserable state of the orphan, be cured?" Childhood hopes for miraculous transformation inevitably fail, and St. Louis' "desperation for things to be made right" transform into "something small, which he swallowed like a tooth, its barbed root settling near his heart." His salvation is his cousin Caroline, who cares for him with authentic passion, but whose protection cannot assuage his yearnings for connection, hope and love.

It is Brown's singular brilliance that permits the interplay between Dr. Hoffman, Caroline and St. Louis to attain symbolic significance. Nor is it an unintended irony that in a fair where "the invisible energy of electricity" fills the air, where things are moved by "unseen forces" and "where everything was shown and yet nothing was revealed," that the three central characters become alive to each other in ways unimaginable to them at the onset of the exposition. "The Hatbox Baby" restores our faith in people because it reminds us that the greatest triumph humans can rightly claim is not the expansion of scientific knowledge but the uninhibited exaltation of our hearts.
I loved this book. There is so much in here that is historically accurate about the baby project. This is so much more than just a story.

This book discusses a love story, a story about a premature baby and a murder as well as a mom who had the baby and is trying to find her husband. It is written in such a graceful way that twines everything together.

I was mesmerized by this book, struggling with the emotions that people thought these tiny beings were "freaks" or not deserving of being alive. I struggled to think of the anguish their mothers must have felt to give them up to give them a chance to live. The doctor was not lauded as a hero but as a monster by some for daring to "exhibit" human beings. (These babies were loved by the people caring for them, they were not made to perform.)

There are so many different facets going on in this book that it should be disjointed, but it is woven in such a way that it works for the story.