No Biking in the House Without a Helmet: 9 Kids, 3 Continents, 2 Parents, 1 Family

When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia." Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. But she and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "We so loved raising our four children by birth, we didn't want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers." A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening--No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty-first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.

• | Author: Melissa Fay Greene
• | Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• | Publication Date: Apr 24, 2012
• | Number of Pages: 368 pages
• | Binding: Paperback or Softback
• | ISBN-10: 0374533385
• | ISBN-13: 9780374533380