"Only Mothers Know" is a very good, indeed a consummate, summary of research, discussion, and controversy, and it is also a very levelheaded as well as compassionate appeal to common sense, to valid cultural experience, and to the realism of Third World modernization. Raphael's project has come a long way from the passionate concern of the early days of the rediscovery of breastfeeding and of female wisdom. Such concern still guides her, of course and righly, but it is tempered (and honored) by her balancing of the politics and faddism of the movement she put into motion so long ago with...