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Although voluntary childlessness has come to be accepted as permissible, the "normal" plans of most American couples include parenthood. Having a child is still seen as a rite of passage to adulthood. When a couple finds out that they are infertile and that life is not going to go according to plan, they  ask, "why me?"  Greil explores not only "why me?"  and the difficulty of finding a satisfying answer, but other questions as well. Why do women and men respond differently to infertility?  Do gender differences play a role in the experience of infertility?  How has medical technology affected the experience of infertility?  Why are infertile couples so committed to the goal of having biological children?

Greil argues that the complexity of infertility comes from its changing statusÐÐit is no longer considered a provate problem but a medical problem that can be solved. The human body is thought of as a finely-tuned machine and infertility is just a mechanical problem.  In America, the author claims, those who suffer from medical problems become subject to cultural beliefs about the nature of illness and the role of the sick. This includes the belief that the sufferer should do everything in his or her power to get better; in the cae of infertility the infertile couple should do everything possible to have a baby. What results is often painful, humiliating, and never-ending treatment programs. But infertile couples are reluctant to stop treatment because new techniques are being developed, and there is always next month. Couples do not consider themselves infertile forever, they consider themselves "not yet pregnant."

Greil explores the effect that infertility has on men and women, and why men seem to accept infertility more easily than women. Women see infertility as failure, they see themselves as incomplete. Men, seeing infertility more frequently as something they cannot change, ask why worry about it?  Greil also explores what effect these attitudes have on the couple's marriage, on relationships with their relatives, and with their fertile friends.  Infertility is not just a medical problem, it is a personal and emotional problem that affects all other aspects of the couple's life. This is a thorough investigation of what fertility means to contemporary American couples.

It has long been recognized that affect (that is, the noncognitive aspect of mental activity) plays a large role in writing and in learning to write. According to Susan H. McLeod, however, the model that has been most used for empirical research on the writing process is based on cognitive psychology and does not take into account affective phenomena. Nor does the social constructionist view of the writing process acknowledge the affective realm except in a very general way. To understand the complete picture, McLeod insists, we need to explore how cognitive, affective, and social elements interact as people write.

In this book, McLeod follows a group of students through a semester of writing assignments, tracking the students’ progress and examining the affective elements relevant to their writing. To facilitate future discussion of these phenomena, McLeod also provides suggested definitions for terms in the affective domain.

In a very real sense, this book is the result of a collaboration of three Susans: Susan McLeod, who researched and wrote the book; Sue Hallett, an instructor in Washington State University’s composition program whose classes McLeod observed and who helped provide much of the data; and Susan Parker, a graduate student who observed Hallett’s class and who ran a tutorial connected to that class. To provide a narrative structure, McLeod and her two collaborators have constructed a simulated semester, conflating the year and a half of the study into one semester and creating a class that is a composite drawn from seven classrooms over three semesters.

Although philosophers have had much to say about the affective domain, Notes on the Heart is based for the most part on research from the social sciences. Discussions of pedagogy, while meant to have practical value, are suggestive rather than prescriptive. The goal is to help teachers see their practice in new way.

Teachers will be particularly interested in McLeod’s discussion of teacher affect/effect. This section examines both the issue of the "Pygmalion effect" (students becoming better because the teacher believes they are) and perhaps the more common opposite, the "golem effect" (students becoming less capable because their teachers view them that way).