Title: The worth of a child
Author: Murray, Thomas H 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Philosophy | Ethics | Medicine | Social Problems | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Thomas Murray's graceful and humane book illuminates one of the most morally complex areas of everyday life: the relationship between parents and children. What do children mean to their parents, and how far do parental obligations go? What, from the beginning of life to its end, is the worth of a child?Ethicist Murray leaves the rarefied air of abstract moral philosophy in order to reflect on the moral perplexities of ordinary life and ordinary people. Observing that abstract moral terms such as altruism and selfishness can be buried in the everyday doings of families, he maintains that ethical theory needs a richer description than it now has of the moral life of parents and children. How far should adults go in their quest for children? What options are available to women who do not want to bear a child now? Should couples be allowed to reject a child because of genetic disability or "wrong" gender? How can we weigh the competing claims of the genetic and the rearing parents to a particular child? The Worth of a Child couples impressive learning with a conversational style. Only by getting down to cases, Murray insists, can we reach moral conclusions that are unsentimental, farsighted, and just. In an era of intense public and private acrimony about the place and meaning of "family values," his practical wisdom about extraordinary difficult moral issues offers compelling reading for both experienced and prospective parents, as well as for ethicists, social and behavioral scientists, and legal theorists.   [brief]
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Title: Searching for life: the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the disappeared children of Argentina
Author: Arditti, Rita 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Latin American Studies | Sociology | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: FROM THE BOOK :"I want to touch you and kiss you.""You are my mother's sister and only one year older; you must have something of my mother in you." - A found child after being returned to her family Searching for Life traces the courageous plight of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who challenged the ruthless dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Acting as both detectives and human rights advocates in an effort to find and recover their grandchildren, the Grandmothers identified fifty-seven of an estimated 500 children who had been kidnapped or born in detention centers. The Grandmothers' work also led to the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank, the only bank of its kind in the world, and to Article 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the "right to identity," that is now incorporated in the new adoption legislation in Argentina. Rita Arditti has conducted extensive interviews with twenty Grandmothers and twenty-five others connected with their work; her book is a testament to the courage, persistence, and strength of these "traditional" older women.The importance of the Grandmothers' work has effectively transcended the Argentine situation. Their tenacious pursuit of justice defies the culture of impunity and the historical amnesia that pervades Argentina and much of the rest of the world today. In addition to reconciling the "living disappeared" with their families of origin, these Grandmothers restored a chapter of history that, too, had been abducted and concealed from its rightful heirs.   [brief]
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Title: And now my soul is hardened: abandoned children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 
Author: Ball, Alan M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: Warfare, epidemics, and famine left millions of Soviet children homeless during the 1920s. Many became beggars, prostitutes, and thieves, and were denizens of both secluded underworld haunts and bustling train stations. Alan Ball's study of these abandoned children examines their lives and the strategies the government used to remove them from the streets lest they threaten plans to mold a new socialist generation. The "rehabilitation" of these youths and the results years later are an important lesson in Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: Mother without child: contemporary fiction and the crisis of motherhood 
Author: Hansen, Elaine Tuttle 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Literature | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Women's Studies | American Literature | Ethnic Studies | American Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Revealing the maternal as not a core identity but a site of profound psychic and social division, Hansen illuminates recent decades of feminist thought and explores novels by Jane Rule, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, and Fay Weldon. Unlike traditional stories of abandoned children and bad mothers, these narratives refuse to sentimentalize motherhood's losses and impasses. Hansen embraces the larger cultural story of what it means to be a mother and illuminates how motherhood is being reimagined today.   [brief]
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Title: Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 
Author: Kinder, Marsha
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Television and Radio | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: How do children today learn to understand stories? Why do they respond so enthusiastically to home video games and to a myth like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And how are such fads related to multinational media mergers and the "new world order"? In assessing these questions, Marsha Kinder provides . . . [more]
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Title: Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life
Author: Lareau, Annette
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology | Education
Publisher's Description: Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously - as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.   [brief]
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Title: Targeting autism: what we know, don't know, and can do to help young children with autism and related disorders
Author: Cohen, Shirley
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | Education | Psychology | Psychiatry | Medicine
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Title: Honky
Author: Conley, Dalton 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | American Studies | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: This intensely personal and engaging memoir is the coming-of-age story of a white boy growing up in a neighborhood of predominantly African American and Latino housing projects on New York's Lower East Side. Vividly evoking the details of city life from a child's point of view - the streets, buses, and playgrounds - Honky poignantly illuminates the usual vulnerabilities of childhood complicated by unusual circumstances. As he narrates these sharply etched and often funny memories, Conley shows how race and class shaped his life and the lives of his schoolmates and neighbors. A brilliant case study for illuminating the larger issues of inequality in American society, Honky brings us to a deeper understanding of the privilege of whiteness, the social construction of race, the power of education, and the challenges of inner-city life. Conley's father, a struggling artist, and his mother, an aspiring writer, joined Manhattan's bohemian subculture in the late 1960s, living on food stamps and raising their family in a housing project. We come to know his mother: her quirky tastes, her robust style, and the bargains she strikes with Dalton - not to ride on the backs of buses, and to always carry money in his shoe as protection against muggers. We also get to know his father, his face buried in racing forms, and his sister, who in grade school has a burning desire for cornrows. From the hilarious story of three-year-old Dalton kidnapping a black infant so he could have a baby sister to the deeply disturbing shooting of a close childhood friend, this memoir touches us with movingly rendered portraits of people and the unfolding of their lives. Conley's story provides a sophisticated example of the crucial role culture plays in defining race and class. Both of Conley's parents retained the "cultural capital" of the white middle class, and they passed this on to their son in the form of tastes, educational expectations, and a general sense of privilege. It is these advantages that ultimately provide Conley with his ticket to higher education and beyond. A tremendously good read, Honky addresses issues both timely and timeless that pertain to us all.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to go to school in Japan: the transition from home to preschool life
Author: Peak, Lois
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Education
Publisher's Description: Japanese two-year-olds are indulged, dependent, and undisciplined toddlers, but by the age of six they have become obedient, self-reliant, and cooperative students. When Lois Peak traveled to Japan in search of the "magical childrearing technique" behind this transformation, she discovered that the answer lies not in the family but in the preschool, where teachers gently train their pupils in proper group behavior. Using case studies drawn from two contrasting schools, Peak documents the important early stages of socialization in Japanese culture.Contrary to popular perceptions, Japanese preschools are play-centered environments that pay little attention to academic preparation. It is here that Japanese children learn their first lessons in group life. The primary goal of these cheerful--even boisterous--settings is not to teach academic facts of learning-readiness skills but to inculcate behavior and attitudes appropriate to life in public social situations.Peak compares the behavior considered permissible at home with that required of children at preschool, and argues that the teacher is expected to be the primary agent in the child's transition. Step by step, she brings the socialization process to life, through a skillful combination of classroom observations, interviews with mothers and teachers, transcripts of classroom events, and quotations from Japanese professional literature.   [brief]
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Title: Listening in the silence, seeing in the dark: reconstructing life after brain injury
Author: Johansen, Ruthann Knechel 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Medicine | Health Care | Autobiographies and Biographies | Medical Anthropology | Psychiatry
Publisher's Description: Traumatic brain injury can interrupt without warning the life story that any one of us is in the midst of creating. When the author's fifteen-year-old son survives a terrible car crash in spite of massive trauma to his brain, she and her family know only that his story has not ended. Their efforts, Erik's own efforts, and those of everyone who helps bring him from deep coma to new life make up a moving and inspiring story for us all, one that invites us to reconsider the very nature of "self" and selfhood. Ruthann Knechel Johansen, who teaches literature and narrative theory, is a particularly eloquent witness to the silent space in which her son, confronted with life-shattering injury and surrounded by conflicting narratives about his viability, is somehow reborn. She describes the time of crisis and medical intervention as an hour-by-hour struggle to communicate with the medical world on the one hand and the everyday world of family and friends on the other. None of them knows how much, or even whether, they can communicate with the wounded child who is lost from himself and everything he knew. Through this experience of utter disintegration, Johansen comes to realize that self-identity is molded and sustained by stories. As Erik regains movement and consciousness, his parents, younger sister, doctors, therapists, educators, and friends all contribute to a web of language and narrative that gradually enables his body, mind, and feelings to make sense of their reacquired functions. Like those who know and love him, the young man feels intense grief and anger for the loss of the self he was before the accident, yet he is the first to see continuity where they see only change. The story is breathtaking, because we become involved in the pain and suspense and faith that accompany every birth. Medical and rehabilitation professionals, social workers, psychotherapists, students of narrative, and anyone who has faced life's trauma will find hope in this meditation on selfhood: out of the shambles of profound brain injury and coma can arise fruitful lives and deepened relationships. Keywords: narrative; selfhood; therapy; traumatic brain injury; healing; spirituality; family crisis; children   [brief]
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Title: Our mother-tempers 
Author: Levy, Marion J. (Marion Joseph) 1918-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This book boldly states and deeply analyzes a commonplace observation about us all: our mothers play a powerful role in making us the kind of people we are. By the age of three, four, or five, virtually all children have learned to walk, talk, eat, sleep, control bodily functions, interact with other people, be male, or be female - insofar as these things are learned - from their mothers (or a mother surrogate who is female). Every mother has known and knows this. Most social analysts, according to the author, both know it and ignore it. If our mothers are asymmetrically influential in shaping our initial years, and our fathers usually in the background, what does it reveal about the social sources of human sex roles, including the universal precedence of males over females in all known societies?These are fundamental, normative, and often deeply emotional matters. Professor Levy seeks to consider them in a scientific spirit, clear the path for better understandings of the role of mothers, and inspire new research on early socialization.   [brief]
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Title: History and tropology: the rise and fall of metaphor 
Author: Ankersmit, F. R
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Philosophy | Literary Theory and Criticism | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: "The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, many published for the first time, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities.   [brief]
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Title: Mallarmé's children: symbolism and the renewal of experience
Author: Smith, Richard Cándida
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Intellectual History | Art | European Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Cándida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.Cándida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarmé was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarmé's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.   [brief]
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Title: Working families: the transformation of the American home
Author: Hertz, Rosanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: The dynamics of work and parenthood are in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the United States. Focused around a major factor in this shift - the rise of dual-income families - this groundbreaking volume provides a highly informative snapshot of the intricate fabric of work and family in the United States. With selections written by leading scholars both inside and outside academia, Working Families offers intimate stories of how families manage and how children respond to the rigors of their parents' lives, as well as broad overviews developed from survey and census data. Taken together, these essays present an updated and integral view of the revolutionary changes in patterns of work and family life occurring today. Using a broad range of methodologies, the contributors reach across gender, age, and class differences. They discuss working-class as well as affluent dual-career couples and work sites ranging from factories to offices. Straddling racial divides, the essays range from studies of white day care providers to a close look at a Mexican maid's daughter. The collection as a whole refutes the assumption that there is one normal type of family or workplace. These readable essays capture our attention as they build, cumulatively, to an absorbing picture of today's families and workplaces.   [brief]
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Title: Echo and Narcissus: women's voices in classical Hollywood cinema 
Author: Lawrence, Amy
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? In Echo and Narcissus , Amy Lawrence examines eight classic films to show how women's speech is repeatedly constructed as a "problem," an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the representation of women in film, enabling us to see individual films in new ways, and to ask new questions of other films.Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase , Sorry,Wrong Number , Notorious , Sunset Boulevard (1950) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence illustrates how women's voices are positioned within narratives that require their submission to patriarchal roles and how their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's natural ability to speak is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are foregrounded, called upon to silence women and to restore the primacy of the image.Unlike the usage of "voice" by feminist and literary critics to discuss broad issues of authorship and point of view, in film studies the physical voice itself is a primary focus. Echo and Narcissus shows how assumptions about the "deficiencies" of women's voices and speech are embedded in sound's history, technology, uses, and marketing. Moreover, the construction of the woman's voice is inserted into the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film.   [brief]
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Title: Precious nonsense: the Gettysburg address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Twelfth night 
Author: Booth, Stephen
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature
Publisher's Description: Why do we value literature so? Many would say for the experience it brings us. But what is it about that experience that makes us treasure certain writings above others? Stephen Booth suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. He uses three disparate texts - the Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson's epitaphs on his children, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night - to demonstrate how poetics triumphs over logic in the invigorating mental activity that enriches our experience of reading. Booth presents his case in a book that is crisply playful while at the same time thoroughly analytical. He demonstrates the lapses in logic and the irrational connections in examples of very different types of literature, showing how they come close to incoherence yet maintain for the reader a reliable order and purpose. Ultimately, Booth argues, literature gives us the capacity to cope effortlessly with, and even to transcend, the complicated and demanding mental experiences it generates for us.This book is in part a witty critique of the trends - old and new - of literary criticism, written by an accomplished and gifted scholar. But it is also a testimony to the power of the process of reading itself. Precious Nonsense is certain to bring pleasure to anyone interested in language and its beguiling possibilities.   [brief]
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Title: One of the children: gay black men in Harlem 
Author: Hawkeswood, William G d. 1992
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | African American Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Gay black men, a thriving subculture of the black and gay communities, are doubly marginalized. Along with other black men, they are typically portrayed in the media and literature as "street corner men" - unemployed drifters, absentee fathers, substance abusers. In the larger gay community, they are an invisible minority. One of the Children , the first formal cultural study of gay black men in Harlem, not only illuminates this segment of America's gay population but presents a far richer, more diverse portrait of black men's lives than is commonly perceived.Based on two years' intensive research - during which the author lived in Harlem's gay community - including extensive interviews with fifty-seven community members, this book depicts gay black men's lives in all their social, economic, and cultural complexity. William Hawkeswood takes us from the street into the homes and lives of his subjects. He describes the elaborate network of friends, called "family," that supports these men emotionally and financially, and the community's two-tiered economic structure, comprising gay men and "boys," or hustlers.Hawkeswood also explores what it means for these men to be both gay and black. In the process, he makes the surprising discovery that while the AIDS virus looms all around them, it has not yet significantly affected the community of gay blacks who choose their sexual partners exclusively from among Harlem's other gay black men.   [brief]
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: The art of living: Socratic reflections from Plato to Foucault
Author: Nehamas, Alexander 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical Literature and Language | Philosophy | Social and Political Thought | Literature
Publisher's Description: For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault.Why does each of these philosophers - each fundamentally concerned with his own originality - return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him.This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself.   [brief]
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Title: The collective and the individual in Russia: a study of practices
Author: Kharkhordin, Oleg 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Social Theory | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals - which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them - had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather than the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity. He also finds that objectification of the individual in Russia relied on practices of mutual surveillance among peers, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West. The implications of this book expand well beyond its brilliant analysis of the connection between Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodoxy to shed light on many questions about the nature of Russian society and culture.   [brief]
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