The question that engages historian Haag—what’s happening to the institution of marriage—gets a complicated and sometimes murky answer.
The author, former director of research for the American Association of University Women, interviewed dozens of people, conducted online surveys and perused scholarly literature and contemporary newspapers and magazines to discover what marriage means to people today. As her subtitle indicates, her view is that society has entered the post-romantic marriage era. The romantic paradigm of marriage, in which marriage was entered into for love, is being replaced by a new cultural view, just as traditional marriage, in which marriage was needed for status and procreation, was replaced by the romantic view. In this post-romantic era, she finds that low-conflict, low-stress, semi-happy marriages are common, and she proposes that alternative ways of thinking about marriage are needed. Through the stories of individuals whom she calls marriage pioneers, she illustrates some of the pressures exerted by such factors as work, parenting and sex, and shows how some couples are changing the rules and choosing to look at and handle such matters differently. For example, where monogamy was central to the romantic marriage, in the post-romantic marriage, extramarital affairs are often no longer regarded as deal breakers; where romantic marriage was presumably “til death do us part,” the post-romantic marriage may be term-limited. Post-romantic spouses may be more like best friends or congenial companions, and rather than constituting a twosome, may be part of a more open network of colleagues. In other words, in this post-romantic era, marriage may be losing its special place and becoming more like other kinds of relationships in people’s lives. Haag’s use of couple’s stories (including some from her own marriage) to illustrate trends makes the book an easy read with a low jargon quotient, and readers looking for parallels to their own marital situations may well find them here. Despite a title that seems ripped from a tabloid, this is a serious examination of contemporary marriage and a fruitful source of discussion material for women’s groups.
Pub Date: May 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-171928-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid...
Four Girls and a Doctor: Mehta offers his recollections of the mostly unhappy love affairs that preoccupied his early years in New York, and of the psychoanalyst who helped him get over them.
As a memoirist, Mehta (A Ved Mehta Reader, 1998, etc.) has made a career out of the rather extraordinary circumstances of his childhood and education. The son of a cultured and well-connected physician, Mehta grew up in India and nearly died of meningitis when he was four. Although he recovered, the raging fever brought on by the disease left him permanently blind. Since there were no schools for the blind in India at the time, Mehta was given an informal education at home by his father, and in 1949 (at 15), he traveled by himself to America and enrolled in a school for the blind in Little Rock, Arkansas. He later studied at Oxford and did graduate work at Harvard. This volume describes his early years in New York during the 1960s, when he was working as a staff writer at the New Yorker and beginning to establish his reputation as an essayist and journalist of renown. Most of the author’s recollections here, however, are of the various women he fell in love with during that time. Some of the affairs (with the dancer Gigi, for instance) were uncomplicated and relatively harmless, but others (such as his long romance with a poet and graduate student named Kilty, whom he nearly married) failed spectacularly and left the author in deep depressions that took years of therapy to undo. The last section of the account depicts Mehta’s dealing with one Dr. Bak, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who helped him sort out his feelings towards his lovers and himself.
Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid and real, although many of the particular details (e.g., the prostate treatments he underwent to overcome his supposed impotence) are a tad more informative than necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-321-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Like many medicines, probably best taken in small doses.
Broadcaster/writer Terkel (The Spectator, 1999, etc.) explores death and its impact on our sense of ourselves and on the meaning in our lives, in the latest in his pioneering series of oral histories.
The 60 interview subjects include professionals concerned with death and dying (doctors, social workers, clergy, police officers, firefighters), survivors of comas or near-death experiences, veterans of wars from WWII to Vietnam, singers and actors, civil-rights-movement veterans and AIDS activists. Many, like the astonishing Kid Pharaoh, will be familiar to readers of other Terkel volumes. Here, they share their reflections on the deaths of friends and loved ones, on the prospect of their own demise, and on their faith or lack if it—in the hereafter, in God, in human love, in the goodness of life, in the heartbreaking beauty of finitude. It’s remarkable how many of them have experienced some kind of communion with their beloved dead. There is food for reflection here for anyone both fascinated and frightened (and who isn’t?) by the thought of death. Readers will long remember Lloyd “Pete” Haywood, shot by a gangbanger and left for dead in the elevator of a housing project, whose faith allows him to refuse revenge; Dimitri Mihalis, a physicist who, having passed through depression, traumatic brain injury, and lithium psychosis, can still say, “My life has been touched by grace”; Maureen Young, the mother of a teenager killed, seemingly at random, by a teenaged gang member, who finds herself reaching out to her son’s killer; William Herdegen, a remarkably compassionate undertaker unafraid of the bodies of the victims of AIDS. Unfortunately, others interviewed blend together; for all their variety of race, profession, belief (or lack of it), and sexual orientation, perhaps too many of his subjects are in Terkel’s own progressive, activist mold.
Like many medicines, probably best taken in small doses.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-56584-692-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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