Caveat to the reader: Your Best Birth is written by and for women who want to reclaim a more natural form of childbirth where medical intervention is relegated to emergency situations rather than instituted as commonplace pratice. It is not for women without a granola streak or who don't possess a single hippieish tendancy.

If your preference is for modern, standard pratice, medically managed chilbirth, you will not like this book. If you feel it is foolish to question the wisdom of labor inductions, enforced time limits on how long a woman can labor before being required to have a c-section, the routine use of labor augmenting drugs such as Pitocin, and the increasing frequency of cesarean sections, then this book will likely annoy you. And in fact, you will probably be offended by its suggestion that laboring and delivering flat on your back while hooked to monitors and numbed by an epidural can be harmful to your body and your baby.

If you don't hunger for a revolution in American maternity care and childbirth, put this book down and walk away. Reading it would be a waste of your time. What this book advocates is a less medically invasion form a childbirth similar to the European model, and it is arguable that its point of view is as biased as the one presented by the medical-industrial complex and endorsed by the American Medical Association. It's the other side to Big Medicine's one-sided story, illustrated by the personal experience of over a dozen mothers as well as doctors, nurses, and midwives.

Your Best Birth is heavy on the personal narrative although it contains relevant facts and statistics. It has a very conversational tone and is reader friendly rather than scholarly. The information in each of the chapters is illustrated by anecdotes from mothers, midwives, doctors, researchers, and medical professionals and include celebrity birth stories. Some of the authoritative sources interviewed in this book are Dr. Jacques Mortiz, OB-GYN, Dr. Marsden Wagner, former director of the maternal and child health division at the World Health Organization, and America's most famous midwife Ina May Gaskin.

Each chapter contains sidebars of additional information and personal stories. I thought the ones in chapters covering labor induction and cesarean sections were the most helpful. They detail good and bad reasons for inductions and c-sections. They also list questions to ask before being induced, c-section myths and risks, and legitimate as well as questionable reasons for having a c-section.

Chapter 2 describes the differences between hospital, birth center, and home birth venues and includes handy lists of questions to ask on a hospital tour, when selecting a birth center, and/or when considering a home birth. There are also lists of questions to ask when selecting an OB-GYN or midwife and when hiring a doula.

The appendix provides a toolkit for crafting a birth plan, and there are resources for further reading and an index.