woodys-uk
Price: £15.46
In stock
83 used & new from £0.01
See All Buying Options
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
 
Nobody's Child
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

Nobody's Child (Hardcover)

by Kate Adie (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

Available from these sellers.


16 new from £0.01 58 used from £0.01 9 collectible from £2.70
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Paperback (New Ed) £8.99 £6.32 90 used & new from £0.01
Audio CD (Audiobook) 2 used & new from £4.00
Audio Cassette (Audiobook) 10 used & new from £0.98
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
Get up to 65% off some of our top titles. Shop now

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Kindness of Strangers : The Autobiography

The Kindness of Strangers : The Autobiography

by Kate Adie
4.2 out of 5 stars (20)  £6.96
Into Danger: People Who Risk Theirs Lives for Work: Risking Your Life for Work

Into Danger: People Who Risk Theirs Lives for Work: Risking Your Life for Work

by Kate Adie
5.0 out of 5 stars (2)  £5.97
Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War

Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War

by The Imperial War Museum
4.7 out of 5 stars (3)  £5.49
Blue-Eyed Son: The Story of an Adoption

Blue-Eyed Son: The Story of an Adoption

by Nicky Campbell
4.5 out of 5 stars (11)  £4.76
The Autobiography: The Kindness of Strangers

The Autobiography: The Kindness of Strangers

by Kate Adie
› Explore similar items

Product details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd; First Edition edition (12 Sep 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0340838000
  • ISBN-13: 978-0340838006
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 3.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 331,156 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Product Description

Review

'intelligent and fascinating' -- Daily Telegraph 'her singular talent for memoir and reportage is integrated into her experiences as an adopted child! Her writing is witty, compelling and never mawkish.' -- Observer 'written with a sure touch! Adie has a natural understanding of what it is like to be unsure of your origins.' -- Sunday Telegraph 'a cracker of a subject ... (Adie) writes with an engaging, forthright immediacy... succeeds in the important sense that it makes what had previously seemed an act of unimaginable heartlessness a little easier to understand.' -- New Statesman 'thoughtful, heart-rending but also heartwarming... one of the strengths of this book is the way Adie slowly establishes how the incidentals of an individual's identity can become desperately important when you simply don't know the real answers.' -- Evening Standard 20050919 PRAISE FOR KATE ADIE'S PREVIOUS BOOKS 20050919 'An exceptional account by a remarkable woman' -- Michael Parkinson on THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS 20050919 'The paciest and most entertaining history book to come my way' -- Ian McIntyre, The Times on CORSETS TO CAMOUFLAGE 20050919 'Sharp, witty and full of insights into the BBC and the sometimes crazed world of broadcasting' -- Daily Express on THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS 20050919


Product Description

What's your name? Where were you born? What is your date of birth? Simple questions that we are asked throughout our life - but what if you didn't know the answers? Kate Adie uncovers the extraordinary, moving and inspiring stories of just such children - without mother or father, any knowledge of who they might be, or even a name to call their own. With a curiosity inspired by her own circumstances as an adopted child, Kate shows how the most remarkable adults have survived the experience of abandonment. From every perspective Kate Adie brings us a personal, moving and fascinating insight into the very toughest of childhood experiences - and shows what makes us who we really are.
See all Product Description

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Nobody's Child
62% buy the item featured on this page:
Nobody's Child 4.2 out of 5 stars (5)
The Kindness of Strangers : The Autobiography
23% buy
The Kindness of Strangers : The Autobiography 4.2 out of 5 stars (20)
£6.96
Into Danger: People Who Risk Theirs Lives for Work: Risking Your Life for Work
8% buy
Into Danger: People Who Risk Theirs Lives for Work: Risking Your Life for Work 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
£5.97
Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War
5% buy
Corsets to Camouflage: Women and War 4.7 out of 5 stars (3)
£5.49
Explore similar items
 

Customer Reviews

5 Reviews
5 star:
 (3)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (5 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Somebody's Child, 20 Feb 2006
This book was bought for me by my birth mother who I made contact with 6 years ago at the age of 34. I've just bought it for my sister - also adopted. For anyone who has been adopted, especially someone who is a foundling, the book will be fascinating. The history of foundling hospitals from the mid 18th century to the present day is particularly interesting and not something that, to be honest, I was really aware of. For anyone who has been adopted, there will be many snippets that you will be able to relate to, which in my mind makes the book worth buying in itself. To know that you aren't alone in how you think or react is a crucial step in coming to terms with your past. Overall the book is well written, informative and sympathetic, in a non patronizing way, to the issues related to being adopted. I wonder if I should get a copy for ‘Mum and Dad’?
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking and carefully researched, 27 Oct 2007
This review is from: Nobody's Child (Paperback)
Kate Adie's research into the personal stories of foundlings and adoptees is written with sensitivity and without sentimentality. She talks to people from all walks of life whose uncertain beginnings have left them with a tangled web of half resolved questions and emotions.

As well as looking at the experiences of individual foundlings (many of whom are well known), Adie looks at the issues, personal and practical, moral and cultural, for the mothers who abandoned their babies and across a number of countries and religions.

The book is very thought provoking, particularly as the problem of "unwanted" babies and what to do with them is with us today, all around the world, as much as it ever was.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars What's your Mama's name, child?, 12 May 2009
By Peter Durward Harris "Pete the music fan" (Leicester England) - See all my reviews
(#1 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
First, a note to the reviewer who thought this was Kate's biography - it isn't - she wrote that before she wrote this and it's called The kindness of strangers.

What is your name? What were your parent's names? When and where were you born? We get asked these questions throughout our lives. For most of us, including myself, these are easy questions to answer. For adopted children whose birth parents are known to the authorities (such as Kate Adie), they are a little trickier to answer, but there is another group of people who are unlikely ever to be able to answer these questions accurately. These people are called foundlings and they are the subject of this book.

I'd never come across the word foundling prior to reading this book, but it's easy to work out what it means. Just as a duckling is a baby duck, so a foundling is a baby found - after being abandoned by his or her parents. Even if we haven't seen any for ourselves, we've all heard on the news or read in the newspapers about babies abandoned on doorsteps or in telephone kiosks, taxis, rubbish skips, bushes and any number of other places. Occasionally, the baby's natural mother is identified but more often they aren't. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon, as everybody who even vaguely remembers the Old Testament knows about Moses. Yes, Moses was a foundling. The problem of abandoned babies in Western Europe and North America is nothing like it once was because of contraception, abortion and a reduction in poverty, but it still exists. Elsewhere in the world, the number of foundlings may actually be increasing.

Much of this book is devoted to looking back in time, particularly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In those days, special institutions (called foundling hospitals but they certainly didn't merit the hospital tag) were set up to look after foundlings. The institutions were run in almost military fashion but the mortality rate was appalling. Any foundling who entered such an institution was lucky to come out alive. Boys who came in and survived the ordeal often ended up with a job in the army or navy, which was no surprise given the way they were raised. Girls were trained to be - guess what - domestic servants.

Entry to these institutions was often via a turning wheel that guaranteed anonymity for whoever deposited the baby. It seems from the description and picture that the turning wheel was a bit like a revolving door with the wheel as its base, except that it was at window height and was about the size of a window. So the mother could just arrive at the turning wheel, place the baby on the wheel and leave. Somebody inside would see (or hear) that a new baby had arrived and turn the wheel. At least in Europe, turning wheels have been consigned to history but their modern successors (baby hatches kept at a constant, warm temperature) can be found in Germany. Fortunately, they aren't used very often, but enough to justify their existence. Hey, it's better than dumping a baby in the bushes or on a doorstep.

With imperial expansion, foundling hospitals seized their opportunity to export children for a better life in other countries. American foundling hospitals on the well-established east coast states sent children westwards on inaccurately titled orphan trains. While orphans evoke sympathy because their parents can't be blamed for dying (unless they committed suicide), foundlings are regarded as the offspring of feckless parents, so any sympathy they get is more limited. Maybe a few orphans travelled on these trains but they were far outnumbered by the foundlings. Apart from all the bad history of foundlings in Britain and America, Kate tells us about religious bigotry in Ireland, attitudes to disabled people in Russia and attitudes to girls in China, all of which have affected the treatment of foundlings or made some types of babies more likely to be abandoned by their mothers than others.

In amongst all the historical stuff, Kate tells the stories of various British foundlings that she has met, some of which made huge headlines at the time of their discovery while others have achieved considerable success in life such as Fatima Whitbread the former javelin thrower and Andy McNab the former SAS soldier and now successful author.

The most notorious and strangest case concerns a baby girl, probably born in late 1936, found in a blackberry bush among the hills (the Sussex Downs) near Worthing in August 1937. Most unwanted babies are abandoned soon after their birth where they can easily be found, but this one was abandoned several months after her birth in a well-concealed, remote location, having clearly been well treated prior to her abandonment. She was only found because a family on holiday just happened to take a walk that brought them near enough to hear faint crying (only the mother heard it) in the distance, which was very loud when they got near. The baby, later adopted by a different couple, was still enjoying life as a grandmother in her late sixties wrote this book. Despite the unusual circumstances and nationwide publicity at the time, the birth parents were never identified. If you do a Google search for Worthing baby 1937, you can read more about this story than I`ve said here, but less than you'll find in this book.

This is a fascinating book about an issue that I'd never really thought about before, but which aroused my curiosity. I'm glad that the worst horrors are consigned to history, at least in the developed world, but the problem isn't going to disappear.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Not an autobiography
Thought this was going to be an autobiography based on the fact that Kate is adopted. Far from it. Her own life is possibly the basis for this book but is rarely mentioned... Read more
Published 10 months ago by palace pier

2.0 out of 5 stars very slow and gruelling
Being a big fan of biographies, I thought this one would be great with all the adoption back in the 1970's etc, however author seems to whine on in ridiculous detail about... Read more
Published on 20 Feb 2006

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject











i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.