Families

In Families the author informally visits many dozens of families & 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 anotther one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families' myths, jokes, & rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits on their porches, & takes part, when she can, in their feasts & celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary relative of an Indian tribe, & 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, & orders pizza with a Greek clan in Massachusetts. The author reports on visits to conventional Southern & Jewish households & 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 & ways of achieving kinship, of which birth & marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans & families all over the United States continue to celebrate, quarrel, disband, reunite, & endure. The author makes us realize how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born into & with those we invent as we go through life. Families is compassionate, provocative, & 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, & psychologists.Howard, Jane is the author of 'Families' with ISBN 9780425044865 and ISBN 0425044866.