Cold War Comforts: Canadian Women, Child Safety, and Global InsecurityTarah Brookfield $39.95 Paper, 270 pp. 978-1-55458-623-3
	Canadian Social Policy: Issues and Perspectives5th Edition Anne Westhues and Brian Wharf, editors $52.95 Paper, 456 pp. 978-1-55458-359-1
	The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal ElegiesTanis MacDonald $85.00 Hardcover, 350 pp. 978-1-55458-362-1
	Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and TranslationEva C. Karpinski $39.95 Paper, 282 pp. 978-1-55458-357-7
	Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking BeyondInterfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy, editors $85.00 Hardcover, 388 pp. 978-1-55458-364-5
	Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in DialogueDiana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, editors $85.00 Hardcover, 330 pp. 978-1-55458-264-8

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Fostering Nation? is also shortlisted for the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, awarded by the Canadian Historical Association for the non-fiction work of Canadian history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past. The winner will be announced at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is being hosted jointly by Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo from May 26-June 2, 2012.

Fostering Nation? breaks new ground in the history of social welfare and the family. By offering the first-ever comprehensive look at how Canada cared for marginalized youngsters between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, it tells heart-breaking stories that were the reality for children in foster care, and serves as a reminder that children’s welfare cannot be divorced from that of their parents.

Veronica Strong-Boag is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her previous awards include the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize in Canadian History and, with Carole Gerson, the Raymond Klibansky Prize in the Humanities

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In 1989 Canada signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In two books Katherine Covell and R. Brian Howe discuss how Canada has (or, more accurately, has not) kept their commitments to our nation’s children, reminding us that the obligation does not end with the signing but continues through ratification and implementation of recommendations into policy and practice.

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	Yesterday I blogged about breastfeeding stories in the news, including one about a woman who was arrested for breastfeeding while drunk. I asked Tasnim Nathoo, co-author of The One Best Way? Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada, to comment on the story. Here is what she said:
		It’s been interesting to observe the amount of media attention the issue of breastfeeding while drunk has received recently. It’s not really about whether mothers should drink alcohol while breastfeeding (the amount of alcohol in breast milk mirrors your blood alcohol level – we should be much more concerned about a mother dropping the baby than harming the baby by alcohol poisoning). Perhaps it’s challenging for us all to read about a woman who is simultaneously a “good mother” (she is breastfeeding, after all, currently the “best way” to feed your baby) and a “bad mother” (being drunk and possibly neglectful). I think I’d like to hear more about what’s going on in the life of Stacey Anvarinia and the other women who have recently shared the spotlight on this issue. Perhaps their life circumstances are such that we should be applauding them for attempting to breastfeed at all.
Interested in the outrage that occurred around this story, and increasingly tired of “bad mother” stories in the news, I created a Google Alert for news stories on breastfeeding. This morning’s feed produced one or two information-type stories on breastfeeding health and many more stories about the “taboos” surrounding breastfeeding, which included the story about the arrest and others about difficulties feeding in public or products developed to camouflage the act of breastfeeding. As someone who grew up accepting breastfeeding as a natural part of life I’m always mystified by the furor of the commentary any time it makes the news. It’s as if there is nothing as dangerous as accidentally viewing a woman’s breast.

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In Bismarck, ND, a woman was arrested and charged with child neglect for breastfeeding her daughter while drunk. And the Daily Mail reports that letters poured in by the hundreds when the magazine Mother and Baby asked, Is Britain breastfeeding friendly? The answer was apparently a resounding, “no!”, with 60% of women reporting that it is a stressful experience to breastfeed in public; more than half of them had been asked to leave while breastfeeding  in a public place.

The One Best Way traces the history of breastfeeding policy and practice from the late nineteenth century to the present.  Whereas women were once urged to breastfeed as a patriotic duty, more recently it has become a moral issue, with women who choose to bottle feed their infant feeling branded as a “bad mother.” In between there was the elevation of paediatricians and scientific ideas and the promotion of formula use as the healthier option. Nathoo and Ostry track all these trends and ideologies in this very interesting book.

Their conclusion? It behooves us all to “view individual breastfeeding decisions with respect and compassion.”

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