The Family Roe: An American Story
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
Published:
Recorded Books, Inc. 2021
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River, where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception.
The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.
The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.
Formats
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
Works on MP3 Players, PCs, and Macs. Some mobile devices may require an application to be installed.
OverDrive Listen
Need Help?
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
More Copies In LINK+
Loading LINK+ Copies...
More Details
Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
09/14/2021
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781705048276
Reviews from GoodReads
Loading GoodReads Reviews.
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)
Joshua Prager. (2021). The Family Roe: An American Story. Unabridged Recorded Books, Inc.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Joshua Prager. 2021. The Family Roe: An American Story. Recorded Books, Inc.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Joshua Prager, The Family Roe: An American Story. Recorded Books, Inc, 2021.
MLA Citation (style guide)Joshua Prager. The Family Roe: An American Story. Unabridged Recorded Books, Inc, 2021.
Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
Copy Details
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 3 | 1 |
Staff View
Grouped Work ID:
14cf335b-cd66-69cd-3ba8-02321a2edcf8
Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Sep 10, 2021 11:10:03
Date Updated:
Sep 18, 2023 11:45:49
Last Metadata Check:
Apr 24, 2024 22:55:04
Last Metadata Change:
Sep 18, 2023 11:45:54
Last Availability Check:
Apr 24, 2024 22:55:05
Last Availability Change:
Apr 12, 2024 22:03:00
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Apr 26, 2024 02:10:38
OverDrive Product Record
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG100.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG200.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG150.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG400.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781705048276
- name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
- id: audiobook-mp3
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781705048276
- name: OverDrive Listen
- id: audiobook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- edition
- Unabridged
- mediaType
- Audiobook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Joshua Prager
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- The Family Roe
- dateAdded
- 2021-09-10T21:58:00Z
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=6463481
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
- sortTitle
- Family Roe An American Story
- crossRefId
- 6463481
- subtitle
- An American Story
- id
- BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD
- starRating
- 4
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- duration: 18:52:01
- fileName: TheFamilyRoe_9781705048252_6463481
- partCount: 19
- fileSize: 538220572
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781705048276
- rights:
- type: PlayOnPC
- value: 1
- type: PlayOnPCCount
- value: -1
- type: BurnToCD
- value: 1
- type: BurnToCDCount
- value: -1
- type: PlayOnPM
- value: 1
- type: TransferToSDMI
- value: 1
- type: TransferToNonSDMI
- value: 1
- type: TransferCount
- value: -1
- type: CollaborativePlay
- value: 0
- type: PublicPerformance
- value: 0
- type: TranscodeToAAC
- value: 1
- name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: audiobook-mp3
- onSaleDate: 9/14/2021
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: audiobook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=bf5dc359-ae65-482b-a927-87c32446c4fd&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- duration: 18:41:08
- fileName: FamilyRoeAnAmericanStory-16804
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 538148979
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9781705048276
- name: OverDrive Listen
- isReadAlong: False
- id: audiobook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 9/14/2021
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: audiobook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=bf5dc359-ae65-482b-a927-87c32446c4fd&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Prager, Joshua
- name: Joshua Prager
- role: Author of introduction, etc.
- fileAs: Prager, Joshua
- name: Joshua Prager
- role: Narrator
- fileAs: Rodgers, Elisabeth
- name: Elisabeth Rodgers
- publishDate
- 2021-09-14T00:00:00-04:00
- edition
- Unabridged
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- The Family Roe
- fullDescription
- A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River, where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption. Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception. The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader "family" connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets. An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.
- reviews
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from October 4, 2021
Journalist Prager (The Echoing Green) reveals in this trenchant account the identity of the child at the center of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. After giving two previous children up for adoption, Dallas waitress Norma McCorvey (1974–2014) became pregnant for a third time and, under the pseudonym Jane Roe, challenged Texas’s ban on abortion in 1970. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on the case, however, McCorvey had already given birth to a daughter, who was adopted by a Texas couple. Prager profiles Shelley Lynn Thornton, as she’s now known, as well as the two other daughters born to McCorvey; Curtis Boyd, an abortion provider in Texas; Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a prominent antiabortion activist; and Linda Coffee, one of the attorneys who represented Jane Roe. The book excels in portraying McCorvey, a complicated woman “with an indifference to truth and a need for attention” who falsely claimed that her own mother sought to abort her, and who, in 1995, became an antiabortion advocate, a stance she later said was “an act.” Prager also places her life in the context of her family tree, which included “three generations redirected by unwanted pregnancy.” Nuanced, fine-grained, and gripping, this is a masterful study of the human lives behind a landmark case.
- popularity
- 1134
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/bf5dc359-ae65-482b-a927-87c32446c4fd/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- bf5dc359-ae65-482b-a927-87c32446c4fd
- starRating
- 4
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG100.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG200.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG150.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/1694-1/{BF5DC359-AE65-482B-A927-87C32446C4FD}IMG400.JPG
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: History
- value: Law
- value: Politics
- value: Nonfiction
- publishDateText
- 09/14/2021
- mediaType
- Audiobook
- shortDescription
- A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, "Jane Roe," no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America. Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana's Atchafalaya River, where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma's life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe. Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from...
- sortTitle
- Family Roe An American Story
- crossRefId
- 6463481
- awards
- source: The National Book Critics Circle
- value: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
- source: Columbia University
- value: Pulitzer Prize Finalist
- subtitle
- An American Story
- publisher
- Recorded Books, Inc.
- bisacCodes
- code: HIS036060
- description: History / United States / 20th Century
- code: LAW043000
- description: Law / Gender & the Law
- code: POL052000
- description: Political Science / Women in Politics
