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| A Midwife's Tale: the Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 | 
 enlarge | Creator: Laurel Ulrich
Publisher: Vintage Books
Category: Book
List Price: £8.04
Buy New: £4.47
You Save: £3.57 (44%)
New (27) Used (20) from £3.06
Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 40451
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage Books Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0679733760
Dewey Decimal Number: 974.16
EAN: 9780679733768
Publication Date: June 1991
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: New book. Due to problems with Standard Airmail delivery times from the USA, we have switched to using PRIORITY AIRMAIL ONLY. UK & European delivery is 7-10 days.
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 14 | | NEXT » |
 Inspired me to major in history in college. May 16, 1999
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ulrich's book provides a fecundity of specifics to a genre destined to be overgeneralized. Her excruciatingly detailed research and beautiful writing together create a book which both explores an individual biography and illuminates women's history in the period. The depth of her look at one woman in a single town inspired me to do my own local history research using women's diaries. For anyone interest in women, American history or the techniques of social history this book is a must-read.
This is one of the most interesting nonfictions available. April 28, 1999
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I had to read this book for World Civilizations II and it was definitely worth it. This book shows a new approach to defining past cultures. Ulrich does a fantastic job of pointing out the important facts and letting the not-so-important facts rest.
Martha was fantastic! March 9, 1999
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Martha Moore Ballard is my great x5 grandmother, to read the book and to view the movie was very moving to me. I am also in the medical field. I am a descendant of her son Jon. I attended the movie with other ancestors of Martha and we all enjoyed it. The book shows life was not easy for a pioneer woman.
a moving account of a woman's life March 5, 1999
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Ulrich's book is a moving account in an underexplored area of American History--the lives and economies of early American women. This book is a double triumph--Martha Ballard kept a detailed diary for almost three decades and Ulrich rescued the dairy from oblivion to create a luminous work of scholarship. This book was moving and engaging beyond almost any work of history I have ever read. Nothing else I have ever read has given me a better feeling of what it would be like to live as a woman in those days. What a triumph!
 combination of diary and research February 4, 1999
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is impressive because of the way the author combines the diary and her own research to complement it. The result is that the reader gets an insightful look into what daily life was like for Martha who lived in the late 18th and early 19th century. In most history books one can learn about the big events that happened during a certain time period, but it is rare to understand how people actually lived. Reading this book one sees how much time women spent on daily chores. Because Martha was a midwife and helped the sick, there is also interesting descriptions of how she would treat people and how this differed from how a doctor would treat people. Some incidents touched upon in her diary were extremely interesting and show us that there were similar scandals then as there are today. While some of the details of Martha's daily life are tedious to read, they are helpful in understanding how she lived. Her diary also lacks emotional insight and remains descriptive and impartial, which makes it less entertaining, but no less historically valuable.
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