Morning-Glory Babies: Children With AIDS And the Celebration of Life - Hardcover

McCarroll, Tolbert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312022557 ISBN 13: 9780312022556

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1988

Synopsis

This is the true story of three babies with AIDS and the small lay Catholic community that opened its farm home to care for them.  It is an intensely moving story of the pain of fighting indifferent bureaucrats so that the babies will not be warehoused in hospitals; a courageous story in which the initial hysteria and hostility of rural neighbors are transformed into acts of kindness and charity; a sad story of one baby who dies the day after cutting his first tooth.  Above all, it is a story of hope, as the bonds of love gradually erase the frightening solitude of each baby's past, and good people rally 'round to guarantee the ultimate right of any child:  not to die among strangers.

But this is not a book about dying, it is a saga of living -- the chronicle of a year in which these special children respond to the excitement of each new season, as they bask in love and the gentle California sunshine, cutting a first tooth, taking a first step, and reminding us, the readers, what life is all about -- the small miracles of the average day.

Unlike so much in the AIDS epidemic, this is a gentle and quiet story, a rare patch of calm and wisdom in the midst of hysteria and grief.  Morning-Glory Babies is an incredibly moving story, a story of true heroism of the spirit, a story that will make you proud to be a human being.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

The Starcross Community is a monastic family of lay, nontraditional Catholics, located in Sonoma County in northern California. Media attention was focused on Starcross when it became known that the group adopted babies born with AIDS. McCarroll, one of the Starcross founders, tells the stories of three of these children, sharing the joys that energize the members of his extended family, despite the knowledge that the children they care for are doomed. The book covers one year, during which the children grew and thrived on the farm. Despite the depiction of bureaucratic wranglings over legal guardianship and one child's death 19 days after his first birthday, this is a joyously reflective narrative of "what happened when one small spiritual family was enriched with the presence of children infected with the AIDS virus." It is a story of quiet heroics, one that focuses on life in the face of an epidemic that is calculated to affect 10,000 American babies in the next three years.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0312022557
• ISBN 13: 9780312022556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 161