Missing Mila, Finding Family: An International Adoption in the Shadow of the Salvadoran Civil War (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series) - Softcover

"The greatest contribution of this book, aside from the fact that the Ward and Escobar/Coto families' stories are compelling in their own right, is the telling of an ultimately courageous narrative about what is possible in the aftermath of atrocious human rights violations in Central America. Not just gangs of torturers, mafias of demobilized militaries, the victories of neoliberalism, and mass migration, but rich, complex lives marked by possibility and - if one can say it without being trite - healing." - Laura Briggs, University of Massachusetts "One of the most remarkable books I've read this year is Missing Mila, Finding Family by Margaret Ward, which leaves me with a strong sense that the adoption debate could be - should be - different. It is also a profoundly particular - and hence human - story about how two families, one Salvadoran, one in the U.S., work through their understanding of a wrenching series of events, including death, adoption, and the loss of a child, and somehow come out the other side with an extraordinary measure of grace...The greatest contribution of this book, though, aside from the fact that the Ward's and Escobar/Coto's families' stories are compelling in their own right, is the telling of an ultimately courageous narrative about what is possible in the aftermath of atrocious human rights violations in Central America." - Laura Briggs, somebodyschildren.com

Professor of German Emerita, Margaret E. Ward taught at Wellesley College from 1971 to 2010. A prize in her name is awarded each year to an outstanding senior major in Women and Gender Studies in recognition of Ward's contribution to the establishment of that department. She has published on Bertolt Brecht, post-1945 political drama, and women's biography, including a book on Fanny Lewald, a nineteenth-century novelist and advocate of women's education.