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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... walk and talk and remember is not in much demand . Usually , people prefer to adopt healthy babies , the younger the better , of their own race and approximate heritage . But such babies are scarce , partly because many are aborted and ...
... walks into a room . A grocer on an island off the Carolina coast prepares to spend the winter with his " lady , " who he knows will never marry him . A dentist in South Dakota hires a " deprogrammer " to wean his daugh- ters back from ...
... walk a block and buy croissants or bagels ; I could plan a trip at a travel agency named Shalom Amigo . Several of the people I most like to be with live a short walk or a bus ride away . Others tend to fetch up as houseguests , which ...
... walks her St. Bernard , during cloudbursts , in a rain- coat . The dog wears the raincoat , not the woman . Alopecia nervosa makes men hairless . Anorexia nervosa makes women gaunt as skeletons . No rare word these days WINNOWED ANTHEMS 19.
... walking upright and killing for sport and bearing tools . We mix fricatives and phonemes into speech , we envision our own deaths , we take part at once in finitude and infinity . We can pick a stranger out of a crowd and in a short ...
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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 |