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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Jane Howard. Contents Winnowed Anthems The Veterinarian's Cousin Bean Soup 48 Green and Black Rocks 13 35 55 " He's Been Eating Pork Since He Was Qualified to Eat " " He'll Visit Maxine's Leg Off " 84 98 " I'm Afraid He'll Squeeze His ...
... Rock or Ellis Island or to the moon . In motion there is meaning . Vamos . Going will save us from having to think . Don't fence us in . Give me a mirror and a subscription to Self maga- zine and let me out of here . There's a catch ...
... rock dropped by a boy from a footbridge falls through a car's roof and onto the lap of a young so- cial worker , killing her at once . A helicopter blade goes awry atop a skyscraper , tumbling to the street below , killing five . A taxi ...
... rock in a storm - tossed sea of contradictions . " A woman Kopkind interviews tells him that " Lucifer is trying to make it hard for people to have children , to have a family . " American politicians rarely let up on the subject ...
... rocks in her head seemed to fit the holes in his . " Conferences are not the place to learn what I want to know about families . I do better in kitchens and on porches and front stoops . Once , on the sundeck of a beach house where ...
Spis treści
13 | |
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 |