A rewarding sociological study.
An authoritative report on the American way of partnering and raising children.
Cherlin (Public Policy and Sociology/Johns Hopkins Univ.; Public and Private Families, 2005) offers an accessible analysis of the “great turbulence” in U.S. family life and the ingrained, often contradictory impulses that fuel it. Unlike people in other Western nations, he writes, Americans strongly value both marriage and personal fulfillment. We crave the security of marriages—and the right of unhappy individuals to end them. As a result, we “partner, unpartner, and repartner” frequently, creating stressful transitions that have long-lasting negative affects on children. Tracing the history of family life from colonial times, the author examines the pervasive pro-marriage influence of religion; the pre–20th century belief that marrying for romantic love was a risky proposition; the breadwinner-homemaker family dynamic of the 1950s; and how events of the ’60s—the invention of the birth-control pill, married women’s entry into the workforce, changes in family and divorce law—gave rise to the quest for personal fulfillment. By the early ’90s, notes Cherlin, more than half of new marriages in the United States began as co-habiting relationships. The author’s comparative analysis demonstrates that Americans partner earlier, turn partnerships into marriages more quickly and break up more often than Europeans. Cohabitation is far more common in France and Scandinavia than in the United States, and the U.S. government is the only one to provide funds for promoting marriage. Cherlin considers at length—and dismisses—the widespread notion that American “restlessness” causes frequent partner changes. He urges U.S. policymakers to find ways to slow hasty remarriages—through cash assistance to low-income families, for example—to assure stable ongoing care for the nation’s children.
A rewarding sociological study.Pub Date: April 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26689-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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