No Biking in the House Without a Helmet

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.