FamiliesTransaction Publishers, 1 sty 1998 - 254 In Families Jane Howard informally visits many dozens of families and tries to discover what makes the best ones work so well. Families are not dying, she finds, although they are evolving in various ways. From the tightest-knit nuclear family or extended clan to the most fragile new commune, the family in one guise or another remains everybody's most basic hold on reality. We may run away from our families as many do, but no sooner do we escape than we find another one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families' myths, jokes, and rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits on their porches, and takes part, when she can, in their feasts and celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary relative of an Indian tribe, and a nine-year-old boy who has no family but his mother. She sits with a matriarch on the front stoop of a ghetto house, goes camping with a family in Mexico, has Thanksgiving with another in Iowa, and orders pizza with a Greek clan in Massachusetts. Howard reports on visits to conventional Southern and Jewish households and to innovative ones whose members, lacking a common history, plan on building common futures as if water were after all as thick as blood. She examines the notion that "there are ways and ways of achieving kinship, of which birth and marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans and families all over the United States continue to celebrate, quarrel, disband, reunite, and endure. Jane Howard makes us realize how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born into and with those we invent as we go through life. Families is compassionate, provocative, and profound. The paperback edition of this important work will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the study of familial bonds, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. |
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... becoming step - siblings . Science - fiction fantasies — the colonizing of outer space , the cloning of new organisms from one of 50 trillion cells , the conception of ba- bies in test tubes , extrauterine gestation , being frozen and ...
... becoming limitless . One of the brightest and most sympathetic men I know ended up eating Christmas dinner alone one year , having made such a fetish of not " imposing " on others that others got out of the habit of asking him to . An ...
... become hectic and parenthetical . An Episcopalian widow outside Pittsburgh hires a caterer for after her husband's funeral ; people in her neighborhood seem to have lost the habit of responding to death with food . A pro- fessor is ...
... become quality adults , not just people who will slouch through life . " The quality children were dispatched in their pajamas to bed , while their parents explained to me their theology and more of WINNOWED ANTHEMS 21.
... become parents ourselves . I am a part of that small percentage . What I know about families , apart from the one I was born to , I have learned from the edges of others rather than from the center of my own . My nature , it would seem ...
Spis treści
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35 | |
Bean Soup | 48 |
Green and Black Rocks | 55 |
Hes Been Eating Pork Since He Was Qualified to Eat | 71 |
Hell Visit Maxines Leg Off | 84 |
Im Afraid Hell Squeeze His Brains | 98 |
Miss Hogan Phoned | 113 |
Hurry Back | 126 |
A Question of Scale | 147 |
Nine Years | 171 |
Supermarket Checkout Clerk of the Year | 186 |
Shark Meat Peacock Feathers and Soybeans | 200 |
On the Slaunch | 220 |
A Peck of Salt | 234 |