Family Sociology

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

In her new book, For Better and Worse, Stephanie Coontz unravels the origins of the paradoxical trends impacting marriage. Using the past to illuminate the present, she shows how shifting marital ideologies, gender relations, sexual mores, and emotional mind-sets over time have bequeathed us a welter of contradictory expectations and habits that often sabotage our attempts to build mutually satisfactory relationships.

Whether you're the one with a fear of intimacy, or whether it's your partner who has the intimacy issues, the good news is there are things that can be done to overcome this relationship-crippling problem. Thanks to more and more scientific research, psychologists are beginning to understand more about the disorder and how people can get beyond the barriers they have placed in their own relationships. This audiobook will share many useful tips on how you and your partner can deal with the fear of intimacy and create a long-lasting and meaningful relationship for many years to come.

Conventional wisdom holds that same-sex marriage is a purely modern innovation, a concept born of an overtly modern lifestyle that was unheard of in 19th-century America. But as Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates in this eye-opening book, same-sex marriage is hardly new. Born in 1777, Charity Bryant was raised in Massachusetts. A brilliant and strong-willed woman with a clear attraction for her own sex, Charity found herself banished from her family home at age 20.

At some point while you're listening to this audiobook, a light will click on, and you will instantly understand. Things that have been a mystery to you for years will suddenly make sense because you'll see the inner logic of it all. The world will be a new place for you. Most of the things you think you know about men and women are wrong, according to the author of this book.

J. D. Vance erzählt die Geschichte seiner Familie - eine Geschichte vom gescheiterten Aufstieg und von der Resignation einer ganzen Bevölkerungsschicht. Seine Großeltern, echte Hillbillys, das heißt Angehörige der weißen Arbeiterschaft, versuchten, mit Fleiß und Mobilität der Armut zu entkommen und sich in der Mitte der Gesellschaft zu etablieren. Doch letztlich war alles vergeblich. Misshandlung, Alkoholismus und Armut sind wesentliche Eigenschaften des Hillbilly-Lebensstils.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

Like you, probably, Belinda Luscombe would rather have had her eyes put out than read a book about marriage; they all seemed full of advice that was obvious, useless, or bad. Plus, they were boring. But after covering the relationship beat for Time magazine for 10 years, she realized there was a surprisingly upbeat and little-known story to tell about the benefits of staying together for the long haul.

The winner of France's prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating audiobook explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives - the bedroom. Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king's chamber to child's sleeping quarters to lovers' trysting place to monk's cell.

According to the 2010 US census, more than 70 percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis. Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north.

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden -- to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics.

When privileged parents say that they "want what's best" for their child, they don't consciously add "and not for other children." Yet the practical effect of parents with privilege relentlessly pursuing their own child's interests is that other children are left behind. Author Sarah W. Jaffe interviewed dozens of parents who are resisting the cultural pressures to seek "the best" for only their kids while navigating some of the major decisions that parents make—about childcare, schools, how they use their time and money, and the legacy they hope to leave their kids.

Regardless of how wealthy or poor their parents are, all black boys must confront and surmount the "achievement gap": a divide that shows up not only in our sons' test scores, but in their social and emotional development, their physical well-being, and their outlook on life. As children, they score as high on cognitive tests as their peers, but at some point, the gap emerges. Why? This is the question Joe Brewster, M.D., and Michele Stephenson asked when their own son, Idris, began struggling in a new school.

He runs his own business and coaches Little League. She drives a minivan, and she'd be lost without her trusty BlackBerry. They go on date nights. Their kids attend public schools, play sports, and take music lessons. They live in a roomy house in the 'burbs. They're about as mainstream as families come. They're also polygamists. The Dargers move the conversation away from child brides, Warren Jeffs, and the FLDS to more mainstream polygamists who willingly enter into plural relationships as adults.

Stephen Heywood was 29 years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight, his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine.

Henry Stanton’s 1922 book Sex: Avoided Subjects Discussed in Plain English is intended as a frank (although consevative and moralistic) guide to human sexual behaviour and relationships. It is partly a self-help book, partly an attempt to relay the scientific knowledge of the day in relation to sex and reproduction in a way suitable for popular consumption.

A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves. To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States.

Chronicling Andrew Solomon's stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union; his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban; his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar steeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom; and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change.

In colorful and moving details, this audiobook explores how polyamorous relationships come to be, how they grow and change, how they manage the ins and outs of daily family life, and how they cope with the challenges they face both within their families and from society. Using polyamorists own words, Dr. Elisabeth Sheff examines polyamorous households and reveals their advantages, disadvantages, and the daily lives of those living in them.

David Goodhart asks whether this transformation has been an unalloyed good. Increased opportunities for women, greater freedom and autonomy, and a more equal domestic sphere have brought considerable benefits. However, argues Goodhart, there have been losses as well as gains: liberal trends have produced negative consequences in family breakdown, children's mental health, and the undervaluing of care. Falling birthrates also present major demographic and social challenges.