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. The family , not the individual , is the real molecule of society , the key link in the social chain of being . —Robert Nisbet Twilight of Authority Let me start by telling the story of Ethel and.
Jane Howard. Let me start by telling the story of Ethel and the fudge and the sew- ing machine . Statistics have their place in all this , too , but they will keep for later . Ethel used to stay with us , now and then , when we lived in ...
... tell me I have more than anyone they know . " My husband does corneal transplants , and that's fine , but build- ing an eternal family is just as important . It's not easy , but it's very challenging and very fulfilling . I'm building ...
... tell of " lovely homes " and who say things like " if you so desire , you could put a very unique breezeway in right here . " ( More to my taste by far was the Dutchess County woman who told me , as we drove around to look at her ...
... Tell her to make haste slowly , " said a real therapist to whom , at a party , I happened to mention a friend's separation . " Half this national plague makes no sense whatsoever . I only wish I knew what makes so many couples rush so ...
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 |