Birth Day

"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned twenty-four and starting my third year of medical school."

So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, Mark Sloan has attended nearly 3,000 births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas. In Birth Day Sloan draws on his personal and professional experience to weave the strands of memoir, history, science, and culture into a fascinating - and often funny - tapestry of this fundamental human passage.