Rita J. Simon, Rhonda M. Roorda
Columbia University Press
240 pages. $24.50.
Simon and Roorda interviewed 16 sets of parents who adopted across racial lines, often after having had biological children on their own, to detail the joys and hardships that come with transracial adoptions. One woman, for example, had three biological children with her husband, and then went on to adopt 12 children of other races before she and her husband divorced. She and the children lived in York, Pa., in the late 1960s, which she described as KKK territory, and they were disowned by some members of her family. The book reads like a transcript, which makes for easy going. (212) 459-0600, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup.
