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Lives of Extraordinary Twins
Harvard University Press
September 2005
On Sale: August 30, 2005
314 pages
ISBN: 0674019334
EAN: 9780674019331
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction | Self-Help
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 behavioral
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.
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