Ginnie's review
Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited by Elyse Schein (Goodreads author!)
The dual voices of the reunited twins were affecting and different, but the emotion I carried away from this book was white hot rage at the arrogance of an elite adoption agency, academic theorists and child psychologists secretly separating twins in order to fuel a psychological study so nebulous that even today Yale won't talk about it to the grown up children who were involved. Nearly everyone connected to the study is so busy today covering their legal asses and citing "privacy issues" that the language began to sound Kafkaesque. There are a couple of good guys here, Lawrence Wright who wrote the book Twins and a couple of sympathetic social workers at the agency that had inherited all the secret files from the original one. Other than that, the entire affair had the stink of the African American syphilis study.
My social worker mother worked for a large adoption agency toward the end of her career and I have wished I had asked her more questions about the u...more
My social worker mother worked for a large adoption agency toward the end of her career and I have wished I had asked her more questions about the u...more
I worked briefly in a local government department concerned with making and enforcing adoption policies - strictly confidential and no publicity allowed. I left because the main policies were to do with racial matching rather than putting the children first. Makes me wonder with books like this, how adoption agencies use the children to fulfil their own agendas.
