The Family Nobody Wanted is a 1954 memoir by Helen Doss (née
Grigsby). It retells the story of how Doss and her husband Carl, a Methodist
minister, adopted twelve children of various ethnic backgrounds besides White
Americans (Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Mexican, and Native American).
The couple appeared on a 1954 episode of You Bet Your Life with Groucho
Marx, where they talked about their story.
The story was featured in a 1956 episode of Playhouse 90 directed by a young John Frankenheimer and made into a 1975 TV movie starring Shirley Jones of The Partridge Family fame.
By Amazon Customer on September 23, 2002
By Ken Pierce on June 9, 2001
The story was featured in a 1956 episode of Playhouse 90 directed by a young John Frankenheimer and made into a 1975 TV movie starring Shirley Jones of The Partridge Family fame.
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Reader Reviews of The
Family Nobody Wanted from Amazon.com
5 Stars
Probably my favorite book of all time...By Amazon Customer on September 23, 2002
I
first read this book at the age of 10, after ordering it from Scholastic book
services. I have since read it uncountable numbers of times, each re-reading
bringing warm feelings at the familiar passages. This reprint has been highly
anticipated, as I had wondered for years what had happened to the Doss family
after the end of the book. It is the story of a man and a woman, and their
desire for a family. But it is also much more. It is the tale of the strength
found in a loving family, a family made by love and not biology. It is a
reminder that we are all family, flesh and blood or not, skin color and
ancestry aside. And it is filled with the humor that only small active children
can provide! I highly recommend this book for readers of all ages, and would
suggest it to families to read aloud together.
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5 Stars
An all-time favoriteBy Ken Pierce on June 9, 2001
Only
my closest friends are given the privilege of borrowing this delightfully
written true story; the long out-of-print and (before the days of the internet)
irreplaceable book has been one of my most closely guarded treasures since
childhood. Any family with several small children, of course, will have a store
of hilarious anecdotes; children raised with love combine insouciant joy with
freedom from adult assumptions and habits of thought, so that any house full of
love and children is a house full of unpredictability and laughter. But Helen
Doss, unlike most parents, can capture her children in her writing and pass the
joy on to us. I don't know anyone who has managed to read the book through
without at some point laughing to the point of tears.
But
the book is much more than a connection of Readers' Digest anecdotes strung
together. Ms. Doss reveals, through deft and honest touches, her own weaknesses
and struggles, her impetuosity and her grit. She communicates with power the
pain that can come in so many different ways to a woman with a tremendous need
to love, especially when obstacles - infertility, unreasonable adoption
agencies, poverty - rise up to keep her from satisfying that need. And the
portrait of her husband Carl, who changes as much as the children do, is vivid
and telling. The Carl who says, "Let's take `em all" at the end of
the book is a very different Carl from the one who agrees to the first adoption
largely to humor his wife and to keep her from moping weepily and endlessly
about the house, and whose annual refrain for many years is, "This is the
last one!" You expect him to come on board, of course; but his path is a
bit surprising and most revealing of the essence of the man. In particular his
ability to close ranks against outside interference shows the degree to which
his love for his family is as strong as his wife's, however differently it
might be expressed.
As
a family memoir alone, it would be a classic. But because the children were of
mixed racial ancestry - in the `forties and `fifties - the Doss family became
an unwilling catalyst for the ignorance and prejudice of the time. It is part
of the Doss magic that the love in the family was strong enough to triumph over
the unpleasant incidents, so that those incidents enriched, rather than
poisoned, the Doss childhoods. (Not that this made them less unpleasant, of
course.)
The
book is never preachy. Nevertheless, it is a vivid documentary of how racism
was built into the attitudes of even "nice" people of that time. It
is a sermon of a kind, a sermon lived out in the lives of the Doss family. It
is a primer on how to overcome evil with good, a standing lesson to a nation
still struggling with racial resentment.
But
the genuinely remarkable thing is that, despite the frequent intrusions
suffered by the family from racially prejudiced outsiders, the book is not
about race. No doubt this is because the Doss family was never about race. When
the book crosses your mind in the days after you've closed it - and it will,
frequently - it will not be as a book about race. It will be as a book about a
uniquely special family and about the triumph of love and joy and grace and
laughter over whatever might vainly try to overcome them.
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