Origins: How the nine months before birth shape the rest of our lives

By Annie Murphy Paul

Women who become pregnant today are bombarded with urgent messages about the food they eat, the chemicals they’re exposed to, the stress they feel—and how such prenatal influences will affect their future children. When Annie Murphy Paul first encountered the intense anxiety and overwhelming responsibility that now accompany pregnancy, she was shocked, then baffled, then curious. And when she become pregnant a second time, she decided to investigate.

Over the course of nine months, Paul explores how fetuses are shaped in utero, separating the evidence from the hype and filling in the historical and cultural context. As a science writer, she goes deep into the exciting new field of fetal origins, examining its claims that many of our individual characteristics—from susceptibility to disease, to appetite and metabolism, to intelligence and even personality and temperament—begin in the womb. And as a pregnant woman, she probes the cultural mania that surrounds pregnancy today, bringing to bear her own intimately observed experience. Filled with startling insights and eye-opening perspectives, Origins will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781848504165

Annie Murphy Paul

Annie Murphy Paul is a magazine journalist and book author who writes about the biological and social sciences. Born in Philadelphia, she graduated from Yale University and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, Discover, Health, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She is the author of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives and The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves.

Reviews for Origins

[emresevinc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My expectation from this book was simple: Help me learn the basics of the latest scientific research on how the soon-to-be-born babies are affected by their environment, by their parents behaviors and conditions. The book satisfied this criteria more or less while disappointing in many other aspects.First of all, I don't know whether it was author's general style or she was forced by her editor's commercial pressure but frankly I'm really bored to death with so many personal details and the over-worked narrative structure of the book. Readers of The New Yorker may be buying this sort of story-telling and I'm not against a story told well, however there is neither a coherent nor a very well told story here. A 288 page book could easily be condensed into 100 or less pages without sacrificing any fact related to the prenatal development.The author is free to want a boy as her second child but I'm still wondering what this has got to do with the topic of the book. Does the gender preference of mothers affect the children in any way? I would be more than happy if she cared to provide some research about this after every sentence in which she repeated how much she wanted a boy.Another quite disappointing part was when she mentioned Caesarean section (C-section) only in a few sentences and simply said that this type of childbirth helped her mark her calendar exactly for the day her child will come. How convenient for a busy New York mother indeed! I was expecting at least some discussion against the C-section as well as elaborate arguments supporting it. But maybe I was asking for too much. (Funny thing is that when she writes about maternal leave she mentions a scientist that claims maternal leave "makes good economic sense, since C-sections cost more and require more recovery time for the mother.")The parts where author gives priority to how very young fetuses are shaped by their mother's environment as well as shaping the mother's biology provide lots of food for thought (and in some cases, food for thought is literally meant, the author gives examples on how famines as well as ordinary food choices affect babies long after they have been born). As long as you can supress your feelings during the sections where very irrelevant personal details and political judgments are repeated you'll have the advantage of learning the contemporary landscape of prenatal development research from a popular science perspective.

[atreic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but this was quite easy reading non-fiction. Good for feeling less alone about what it's like to be pregnant (the author's discussion of all the food judging etc etc is spot on) but I didn't really get much out of it I didn't know - eat fruit and veg, exercise is a good idea, maybe green tea?, maybe avoid some plastics?, don't be pregnant in the middle of a siege or a terrorist attack...

[kaelirenee · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I should start this review by explaining what I hope for from a popular-interest science book. I expect an explanation of a theory, discovery, or scientific concept which is accurate, fun to read, well-cited (with citations to scholarly publications so I can read them too), and well-written. I appreciate a little humor, too. Some experiential asides are fine with me, but I don't want to read an autobiography. I prefer my authors to have a science or medical background, but this is not a requirement; I love Mary Roach after all.I was incredibly excited to read Origins. I'm currently pregnant and love reading and researching all of the odd things that happen, all the dictates given by doctors, and I'm fascinated by the history of pregnancy and childbirth. I was the first one in my library to check this out (mainly because the tech services people moved this book to the front of the line for me and gave it to me as soon as they were done). Unfortunatly, Annie Murphy Hall falls far short of my expectations. Her book is 8 parts memoir, 1 part historical overview, 1 part interview recollections. I really don't care about her shopping trips to Whole Foods while she was pregnant. I am curious about the mercury in fish debate. Guess which got more print?Furthermore, she is way too reliant on quotes. It was like reading a freshman's first research paper. She also falls into the same trap that drives me crazy when journalists write about science (though not all journalists)--she cites information found in newspapers and news magazines with the same level of credibility as a scholarly journal.In short, I REALLY wanted to like this book. I love the topic and enjoyed hearing the author's interviews on NPR. But I heard far too much about her pregnancy and far too little about how pregnancy effects us before we're even born.

[paulsignorelli_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Those of us fascinated by learning and how we are affected by the places where learning occurs find ourselves exploring a wonderfully unexpected learning space in Annie Murphy Paulâs "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives": the womb. It is Paul's contention, throughout this well-researched and thought-provoking book, that we haven't given nearly enough attention to all we learn and acquire in those critical nine months before we enter the world. "Origins" is a great first step in filling that gap. Organized into nine chapters representing the nine months of the writer's second pregnancy, the book takes us through tantalizing views of the latest research into what we learn and how we are shaped in utero. Her Month Three explorations of how tremendously stressful situations affect mothers and the children they are carrying remind us that significantly less stressful situations can have significant and long-lasting effects on a learner's ability to absorb and retain information. Her Month Six explorations document how a mother's emotional state might have significant lifelong physiological impacts on her developing child. And the concluding chapters leading us to the moment of her second child's birth remind us of a variety of physical and emotional elements that teach the unborn child what to expect upon entering the world--just as we, as facilitators of learning, convey important messages to learners about what they can expect and might accomplish once they leave our learning spaces and re-enter the world in which they live and work and play.