Product Description

A leading expert on twins delves into the stories behind her research to reveal the profound joys and real-life traumas of twelve remarkable sets of twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Indivisible by Two introduces us to an assortment of memorable characters, from the 'Fireman Twins' - brothers who, though reared separately, are astonishingly similar in personality and behavioural traits - to the twin sisters who overcame one twin's infertility by having the other serve as her surrogate mother. We meet one of the few identical brother-sister pairs in the world after one of two sisters was surgically transformed into a man, and identical triplet brothers, only one of whom is gay while the others are straight. We see uniquely blended families - identical twin brothers marrying identical twin sisters, and Chinese twins adopted by different Canadian families yet raised as sisters. Being a twin can also render the experience of historical tragedy uniquely painful. We meet Stepha and Annetta, survivors of Josef Mengele's heinous experiments in Auschwitz, and untangle the troubled lifelong tie between Jack and Oskar, born in the 1930s to a Jewish father and a German Gentile mother, one raised as a Jew in Trinidad and the other as a Catholic and a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany. Segal unravels these stories and others with an eye for the challenges that life as a twin (or triplet or quadruplet) can pose to parents, friends, and spouses, as well as the twins themselves. These moving stories remind us how incompletely any theory explains real life - twin or not.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #777083 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 314 pages

About the Author
Nancy L. Segal is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton.

Customer Reviews

Mysterious twins
As a parent of identical twins with no other twins in the near family, identical twins seem very mysterious. I continue to watch mine and wonder why and how they arrived in my family. Nancy Segal doesn't answer this question but she observes so many twins and has so much more insight into the myseries of twins that anyone with or even without twins would be interested in this book. Indivisible by Two focuses on "unusual" twins but I certainly felt that my twins were not excluded from her observations. Now I'll move onto her book, Entwined Lives. Hopefully it will add even more to my sketchy , overall view of my twins and others.