Overview

From a talented author who is a favorite of both the indie and commercial markets, the page-turning prequel to The Blue Cotton Gown, which her fans will welcome and which will win her new readers in the baby-boom and natural-living communities. Harman is a gifted writer who is building a devoted following with her unique and dramatic stories. The author of TheBlue Cotton Gownrecounts living free and naturally against all odds-and discovering her true calling as a midwife-in this deeply moving memoir In her first, highly praised memoir, Patricia Harman told us the stories patients brought into her exam room, and her own story of struggling to help women as a nurse-midwife in medical practice with her husband-an OB/GYN-in Appalachia. Now, Patsy reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, recounting how she learned to deliver babies and her youthful experiments with living a fully sustainable, natural life. Drawing heavily on her journals,Arms Wide Opengoes back to a time of counter-culture idealism that the boomer generation remembers well. Patsy opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota in a log cabin she and her lover build with their own hands, the only running water being the nearby streams. They set up beehives and give chase to a bear competing for the honey. Patsy gives birth and learns to help her friends deliver as naturally as possible. Weary of the cold and isolation, Patsy moves to a commune in West Virginia, where she becomes a self-taught midwife delivering babies in cabins and homes. Her stories sparkle with drama and intensity, but she wants to help more women than healthy hippie homesteaders. After a ten-year sojourn for professional training, Patsy and her husband return to Appalachia, where they set up a women's health practice. They deliver babies together-this time in hospitals-and care for a wide variety of gyn patients. They live in a lakeside contemporary home, though their hearts are still firmly implanted in nature. The obstetrical climate is changing. The Harmans' family is changing. The earth is changing-but Patsy's arms remain wide open to life and all it offers. Her memoir of living free and sustainably against all odds will be especially embraced by anyone who lived through the Vietnam War and commune era, and all those involved in the back-to-nature and natural-childbirth movements.

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9780807001714

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Reviews

Praise for Arms Wide Open There are more honest, revealing moments here than in many memoirs. Harman, whose prose is sparse but not simple, covers a span of decades, deftly revealing her own youthful struggles with identity through the children we witnessed her raising earlier in her book, revealing, in short, a full life. --Publishers Weekly The heart of Arms Wide Open is birthing, but its soul is sustainable living and a spirit of environmentally friendly management of resources. Harman's commitment to this theme permeates her book, and with similar focus on other contemporary issues, it is relevant for a vast array of readers. --Rain Taxi This new memoir is a peek at midwife Patsy Harman's early hippie days, a world where idealism and compassion never cease to matter, where her commune mates struggle--sometimes successfully, sometimes not--against an unjust/unwinable war with a limitless sense of personal commitment and self-sacrifice. It's good to hear these stories, good to remember the fervor against the Vietnam War and our collective voices raised in protest. It's heartening to know that the indomitable Midwife Harman still carries on the legacy of those years with a message that is still vital and necessary all these years later. --Carol Leonard, Midwife and author of Lady's Hands, Lion's Heart, a Midwife's Saga Patricia Harman's unflinching honesty and soaring poetry unfold the dream and the reality of the rural communes, political activism, and urban counterculture in the 1970s, and what we, the veterans of that particular era of bohemian life, have become today. She weaves in the telling details--the songs we sang, the clothes we wore, the glories of nature we witnessed, and, most especially, the causes for which we organized and the austerities we endured willingly, for the sake of the earth and all her children. --Alicia Bay Laurel, author and illustrator of Living on the Earth A sparkling, vivid story of how a midwife is born--and survives. This story takes you places you never expect to go. --Tina Cassidy, author of Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born Praise for The Blue Cotton Gown This luminescent, ruthlessly authentic, humane, and brilliantly written account of a midwife in rough-hewn Appalachia, a passionate healer plying her art and struggling to live a life of spirit, stands as a model for all of us, doctors and patients alike, of how to offer good care. --Samuel Shem, MD, author of The House of God, Mount Misery, and The Spirit of the Place Harman has a gift for storytelling, and The Blue Cotton Gown is a moving, percipient book. --Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer As the mother of seven children and veteran of eight pregnancy losses, I knew when I ran my bath that I would be unable to resist Patricia Harman's memoir of midwifery, The Blue Cotton Gown. What I didn't realize was that it would cause me, a sensible person, to get into her bath with one sock still on and rise from it when the candle was gone and the water cold. Utterly true and lyrical as any novel, Harman's book should be a little classic. --Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Cage of Stars Arms Wide Open is more than a book about delivering babies and bringing new life into the world; it's about the deterioration of the optimism once so prevalent in the cracks and crevices of this country. It's about the human spirit, and the desire to do good unto others. But most importantly, it's about Mother Earth, the time we spend here, the things we plant, the mark we leave and the power she has over all of us. --Hippocampus Magazine

Praise for Arms Wide Open <br> There are more honest, revealing moments here than in many memoirs. Harman, whose prose is sparse but not simple, covers a span of decades, deftly revealing her own youthful struggles with identity through the children we witnessed her raising earlier in her book, revealing, in short, a full life. -- Publishers Weekly<br> <br> The heart of Arms Wide Open is birthing, but its soul is sustainable living and a spirit of environmentally friendly management of resources. Harman's commitment to this theme permeates her book, and with similar focus on other contemporary issues, it is relevant for a vast array of readers. -- Rain Taxi <br> This new memoir is a peek at midwife Patsy Harman's early hippie days, a world where idealism and compassion never cease to matter, where her commune mates struggle--sometimes successfully, sometimes not--against an unjust/unwinable war with a limitless sense of personal commitment and self-sacrifice. It's good tos

Author Information

Patricia Harman, CNM, has published in theJournal of Midwiferyand Women's Healthand theJournal of NursingScholarship,as well as in alternative publications. She is a regular presenter at national midwifery conferences. Her first book,The Blue Cotton Gown,was published to acclaim in 2008. Harman lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons.

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