The Search for Anna Fisher.

By Florence Fisher

Book Overview

From jacket: The document lay in the bottom of the bureau drawer. Written in longhand was a name: Anna Fisher. "Who is Anna Fisher?" seven-year-old Florence asked her mother. The woman yanked the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525630015
• ISBN13: 9780525630012
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Arthur Fields Books
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Very Dramatic

This is an extremely interesting book, detailing one woman's search for her birth mother at a time when ALL adoption records were sealed. This gives the story a lot of drama, as Florence must become her own private investigator while unearthing clues about her history over resistance from her adopted family. It's a story of perseverance with a great payoff. The book unfolds like a classic mystery, with the reader becoming as interested as the heroine is in her origins, the circumstances of her adoption, and her birth mother's whereabouts. One also sympathizes a great deal with the writer as she diligently calls government office after office, simply trying to find the name of the woman who gave birth to her. She knows the office employees have the name and file right in front of them, and that her fate is literally in their [disinterested] hands...yet they are precluded by law from sharing information with her. I do take exception to the idea, posted elsewhere, that all parties involved in an adoption need to consent before information is shared. If I gave up a baby some day, I can see how I might not want to discuss it or necessarily made public...but I don't have a right to cut another person, and perhaps their children, off from their family history. Everyone has the right to know who their family was and where they came from. It has a great deal to do with our identity.

I can still feel her yearning

This was the first book I read about an adoptee searching for "someone who looks like me" and it made me viscerally understand the yearning most adoptees have, despite the most loving adoptive parents and most fulfilling lives. They are always aware that there is someone out there with a truly vested interest in what became of them. This beautifully written addictively readable autobiography of a search made me realize that some form of open adoption is the healthiest adoption for the child and both sets of parents, even if they do not fully accept this at the beginning. Consciously ignoring one of life's basic assumptions, that of knowing the people who led to one's very creation, should never be attained without the full knowledge and consent of ALL parties, and most especially the one who is the focus of the new family.