Cheri RegisterCritiques

Cheri Register is the mother of two adult daughters she adopted internationally from Korea. She uses the lessons that she learned from raising them and that she gathered from other international adoptees to write “Beyond Good Intentions.” She covers ten topics, broken out by chapter, that adoptive parents should avoid: 1. Wiping away our children’s past, 2. Hovering over our “troubled” children, 3. Holding the lid on sorrow and anger, 4. Parenting on the defensive, 5. Believing race doesn’t matter, 6. Keeping our children exotic, 7. Raising our children in isolation, 8. Judging our country superior, 9. Believing adoption saves souls, 10. Appropriating our children’s heritage.

The book is a quick, should-read book for internationally adoptive parents. The book’s message is not always easy to “hear,” but for me, it’s a book that provides a reality check, and it is one I will read often as my children grow.

Reviewed at: http://mielniczuk.wordpress.com/2003/09/14/packinghouse-daughter-a-memoir-cheri-...

This was a really good book dealing with the issues of a trans-racial adoption. I enjoyed reading it and learned alot. I would definately recommend this one to anyone else adopting across racial lines.

If you are willing to listen to the authors message - this is a good book. You might find that you have fallen into some of the discriptions she uses -- but if you will hear her, you will learn something. Cheri has two adopted children from Korea - one of which has moved back to Korea to live as an adult. She's been there. The bottom line message I got from this book is LISTEN to those that have gone before. And that means to the adoptees most of all. Read this book - you will walk away from it having learned something - I promise.

In 1959, meatpackers in the little Minnesota town of Albert Lea went on strike to demand better working conditions and higher rates of pay. The plant's owners brought in strikebreakers from nearby towns, violence ensued, the governor of Minnesota called in the National Guard, and for a few days news from Albert Lea filled papers around the United States.

The incident has long been forgotten, even by many local residents. Cheri Register, who was 14 years old at the time, is one who remembers it well. In this affecting memoir of working-class life, she pays homage to her father, who worked in the plant for 31 numbing years, earning 70 cents an hour when he started, a bit more than five dollars an hour when he retired. The work was dangerous and unpleasant, but still an improvement over the alternatives, for, as she writes, "My entire family failed at farming in one of the richest stretches of the corn belt, where water was so plentiful it had to be drained away and the soil so thick that geologists could find no exposed rock."

As she recounts the strike and her father's life, Register describes how the subsequent generational conflicts of the 1960s and her own aspirations divided her family. "To be successful," she writes, "which means free from grueling labor, the children of blue-collar families must be driven from home, away from the familiar and secure." Her book is both a homecoming and a welcome contribution to labor history. --Gregory McNamee (Amazon.com)