Mother and Child - Assouline Coffee Table Books

I purchased this for my daughter as a special bday gift. It did not disappoint.

Great coffee table book! Great price!

The book was lovely but I was disappointed that there were no gift options - I gave it to my daughter-in-law for Mother’s Day. It arrived with the price tag on it and I wasn’t able to arrange for any gift wrap.

I purchased this book as part of a birthday gift for my wife, who will be giving birth to our first child sometime in the next several days. My first thought upon opening the book: Wow, so many white women. As a white man, I am not comfortable giving this to her, much less displaying it in our home. The disproportionate representation is embarrassing.

The book itself is beautiful - but the interior photos and interviews are mostly white women in the Hamptons. It can definitely feel exclusionary if you're not in that particular demographic. I was hoping the interviews and participants would have been a bit more diverse.

The book, although beautifully shot, included only 2, mayyybe 3, families of color. As a white woman, I was offended and can only imagine how others found it. I bought this as a gift for an expectant mother and couldn’t in good conscience even give this away.

Stunning portraiture, exquisite styling and completely false reality. This book promotes a fantasy world of motherhood. The author asks 70+ extraordinarily wealthy women their view on motherhood and photographs these model-perfect women with their cherub-like children (most children in this book are in the infant / toddler stage, with a few tweens and a rare few teens / adults). Questions such as: What did you name your children and why? How do you describe your personal style of mothering and How do you balance self-care and passions while being a mother? are repeated with each interview. It is interesting to see the answers to these questions, but at the same time I have to ask myself, how do these women who obviously have: personal assistants, personal chefs, personal trainers, hair stylists, facial / wrinkle specialists and nannies even begin to represent the majority of mother/child relationships on this planet? They don't! Their take on motherhood is like asking the Queen of England to give her take on motherhood. It's interesting, but not really representative of motherhood from the perspective of the general population-- most of us don't have that much help or financial flexibility! Motherhood is beautiful, tough and the reality is once a woman has children, professional and maternal responsibilities never balance. This book wants to promote the idea that it can be balanced, but like the lives of those chosen to represent motherhood, this idea is a fantasy! Claiborne Swanson Frank, I'd like to challenge you to use your photography skills to photograph modern women whose total family income is $150K or less a year! Coupled with the work you have already created, this change in perspective would give more depth to the meaning of modern motherhood.