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Internet Birth Stories explores why women post birth narratives on the Internet. The author identifies and analyzes common themes that are embedded in these narratives, extracts and interprets what appear to be differences and similarities in them, examines the process of narrating in comparison to that of writing for the Web, and explores the cultural, social, and individual contexts that frame these narratives. Internet Birth Stories is a readable, insightful work that will appeal to a relatively large audience of both academics and lay readers. Feminist scholars tracking the cultural treatment of childbirth will welcome this study in which the birth stories are presented in an engaging fashion. They will also find the analysis to be robust, drawing upon narrative theory as developed in several fields and integrated by the author as well as informed by fundamental psychological inquiry. This will be an important study for the collections in Anthropology, Communications, Folklore, Sociology, and Women s Studies.

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Rachel Raynor is the Collections Manager at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She has a Ph.D. in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA. She has taught at California State University Northridge, Otis College of Art and Design, and UCLA. Her research interests include women s narratives, American folklore, and childbirth.

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