SOURCE: Gardner, Marilyn. “The Baby Myth.” Christian Science Monitor (27 September 2001): 19.

In the following review, Gardner offers an unfavorable assessment of Misconceptions, commenting that the book is narcissistic and lacks specific examples to support many of Wolf's points.

Pregnancy can be a joyous, wondrous time. In the eyes of Naomi Wolf, it can also be a period fraught with confusion, ambivalence, and conflict with medical professionals. As she warns at the beginning of her sobering, often angry book, Misconceptions, the experience of becoming a mother in America is “undersupported, sentimentalized, and even manipulated at women's expense.”

Wolf's own journey to motherhood begins in a small town in Italy, where a pregnancy test confirms her unexpected new state. After she and her husband return home to Washington, D.C., she quickly becomes “inducted into a medical system that had very clear expectations of me—but little room for me to...