Family Sociology

Lasting Marriage is an encouraging and insightful book that will help your marriage grow and strengthen in love and service to each other. You will learn how your marriage can become one of those success stories you hear about. You will be more in love with your spouse at your 50th wedding anniversary than on your wedding day. By knowing and applying God's meaning and purpose of marriage into your relationship, you will have a lasting marriage.

For a mother who’s accustomed to having been number one in her son’s life, the arrival of a girlfriend, fiancé, or wife can be a complicated, confusing, and emotionally challenging event. Likewise, coexisting harmoniously with the mother of her partner can be an overwhelming challenge for any woman. Sons, often caught in the middle, are sometimes understandably reluctant to take sides.

In The End of Sex, Donna Freitas draws on her own extensive research to reveal what young men and women really want when it comes to sex and romance. Surveying thousands of college students and conducting extensive one-on-one interviews at religious, secular public, and secular private schools, Freitas discovered that many students are deeply unhappy with hookup culture. Meaningless hookups have led them to associate sexuality with ambivalence, boredom, isolation, and loneliness, yet they tend to accept hooking up as an unavoidable part of college life.

Developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert has devoted years of research on sex and gender and aims to dispel the myths and further scientific understanding of the Xs and Ys that make us all who we are. Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman? is an exercise in critical and unbiased thinking. From fertilization and evolution to aggressive men and emotional women, Wolpert explores the whole gamut of sexual development and gender differentiation.

Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines investigates the political and cultural significance of marriages and other sexual encounters between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula, from the Islamic conquest in the early eighth century to the end of Muslim rule in 1492. Interfaith liaisons carried powerful resonances, as such unions could function as a tool of diplomacy, the catalyst for conversion, or potent psychological propaganda.

By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the 20th century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as "work."

The best educated and most prosperous have the most stable families, while working class families have seen the greatest increase in relationship instability. Why? The book provides the answer: greater economic inequality has profoundly changed marriage markets, the way men and women match up when they search for a life partner. It has produced a larger group of high-income men than women; written off the men at the bottom; and left a larger group of women with a smaller group of comparable men...

Drawing on the author’s seven years of caring for his mother through Alzheimer's, Be With: Letters to a Caregiver is what its title promises: four dispatches to an anonymous long-term caregiver. In brief passages that cast fresh light on what it means to live with dementia, Barnes shares trials, insights, solace - and, ultimately, inspiration.

The story of the Boston Massacre - when on a late winter evening in 1770, British soldiers shot five local men to death - is familiar to generations. But from the very beginning, many accounts have obscured a fascinating truth: the Massacre arose from conflicts that were as personal as they were political.

After the death of his brother and the sudden end of his marriage, and after his ex-wife moved to another state leaving him alone with their two young children, Dan Glick embarked on single fatherhood in an unusual way: he took his kids on a journey around the world. The idea was to go see some of the world's rare life forms before they disappeared from the planet, and to do it before the kids themselves would grow up and chart their own paths.

Thousands of women have stepped inside Becker’s Bridal in Fowler, Michigan, to try on their dream dresses in the Magic Room, a special space with soft lighting, a circular pedestal, and mirrors that carry a bride’s reflections into infinity. The women bring with them their most precious expectations about romance, love, fidelity, permanence, and tradition. Each bride who passes through has a story to tell - one that carried her there, to that dress, that room, that moment.

In Labor's Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation's future.

In this last book by the late Donald Pitkin comes a story of the Schorcht family, through whose fortunes and struggles one can see the transformations of Germany through the long 20th century.

Lads, lay your claim to the remote control and reserve some fridge space. Now that you're moving in together, there are a few things you should know. This must-have manual will help you work out which parts of the house are yours, why you can no longer cut your toenails in bed, and why sharing bills will cost you more.

Traditional family structures are adapting to make room for children conceived in previously unimaginable ways. Whole industries and internet-enabled communities are being built around reproductive technologies. And there's more change coming as science continues to move forward. Combining intimate personal stories with cutting-edge research, Reconceptions invites listeners to reconsider their own ideas about parenthood and embrace a new vision of the meaning of family.

One in 10 American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision - incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in 33 American children - and one in eight African American children - goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society. Journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the deeply moving stories of real families, how the children of the incarcerated are routinely punished for their parents' status.

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women - lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others - give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

Renew your imagination for what family life can be. Many of us feel overwhelmed about the prospect of raising children in our high-performance, rapid-pace culture. Reflecting on difficulties from our own families of origin can increase our doubt and insecurity about being a good parent. Positive examples of family life can seem few and far between. Mark and Lisa Scandrette understand these challenges, and in Belonging and Becoming they cast a compelling vision of what the family can be.

The crisscrossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore’s inner city, and Nicole, a Black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today.

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.