No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene

No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene

When the two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene confided to friends that she and her husband planned to adopt a four-year-old boy from Bulgaria to add to their four children at home, the news threatened to place her, she writes, "among the greats: the Kennedys, the McCaughey septuplets, the von Trapp family singers, and perhaps even Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev, who, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, gave birth to sixty-nine children in eighteenth-century Russia."

Greene is best known for her books on the civil rights movement and the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. But she and her husband have also pursued a more private vocation: parenthood. "We so loved raising our four children by birth, we didn't want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, we brought in ringers."

A celebration of parenthood; an ingathering of children, through birth and out of loss and bereavement; a relishing of moments hilarious and enlightening--No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a loving portrait of a unique twenty-first-century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.

Melissa Fay Greene is a New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek award-winning novelist and journalist whose work has appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek. She is also the author of the Bloomsbury Publishing books Last Man Out: The Tale of the Springhill Mine Disaster and There Is No Me Without You. She currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.