Outside Reading #1: Book review 10.10.10

Book Review

Birth Pang by Jeremy Groopman

October 3^rd. 2010.

Jeremy Groopman reviewed “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives” by Annie Murphy Paul on October 3rd, 2010. In this review, he stated that this book shows how to eat and have a healthy lifestyle and that what people eat can influence babies’ health. It seems that he praises Paul for writing this wonderful book.

He introduces his review by telling the readers a story about him and his wife. He said that he had three children and were fortunate enough to have three healthy babies. But he had heard from physicians that those babies could not possibly pass all tests. However, when he learned that his new born baby had high Apgar score, meaning that his baby is in good condition, he and his wife believed that they had succeeded avoiding the danger of pregnancy.


The strength of this piece is imagery; Groopman had chosen the words well. For instance, he uses the sentence “…normal simmering anxieties of pregnancy to a neurotic boil”, thus comparing the increasing anxiety of people to boiling. It shows the vivid imagery to readers. Readers can actually imagine their anxieties being boiled.


One of the weaknesses that I found on this review can be found in the beginning of the review. He used “we”, which is first point of view, showing the informal part. In addition he switches from “you”, the second point of view, into “Younks”, which is a person’s last name and the third point of view. This switching of the point of views left me confusing. Also, he seems to use same words repetitively. For example, he used the word “initially” in her first page, thus not showing the new word to replace the word “initially” At last, he did not end his review good enough. He could have done better by ending his review with open questions or statement. Instead, he chose to put down the effects of the war that had on babies in the Six Day War between Arab and Israeli.

Upon reading this review, I have not found any connections between this and other course material or readings for I did not learn any prose type reading in previous literature classes.

His critical perspective seems to be New Historicism. For example, he compared Paul’s hypothesis to David Barker, who was a British physician in 1989 and stated that “…poor maternal nutrition put offspring at risk for heart disease decades later.” He also wrote down that Paul’s second child was boy, thus showing his interest of author’s background.

Overall, I laud Paul for writing this excellent review.  He uses good diction and various sentence structures. He offers his opinion of the books rather than putting reluctant examples.