Not available to order
Publication date:
07 August 2014Length of book:
160 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442236646
The United States has the highest family fragmentation rates in the industrial world. Nonmarital birth rates for the nation as a whole are 40%, with proportions dramatically higher in many communities as defined by race, ethnicity, or geography. Divorce rates, while moderating in recent decades, are still estimated at about 40% for first marriages and 50% for second ones. Together, this fragmentation impacts millions of children as well as adults, leading to educational, economic, and other losses that in turn lead to lower social mobility and deepening class divisions.
In Broken Bonds, Mitch Pearlstein explores the declining state of the American family and what its disintegration means for our future. Based on candid interviews with forty leading family experts across the political spectrum - from Stephanie Coontz, to Heather Mac Donald - Pearlstein ruminates on the political, social, and spiritual fallout of this trend. In honest and frank conversations, Pearlstein and his interviewees fearlessly diagnose the problems that many have been too timid to explore and suggest ways to reverse these trends that threaten our social fabric.
In Broken Bonds, Mitch Pearlstein explores the declining state of the American family and what its disintegration means for our future. Based on candid interviews with forty leading family experts across the political spectrum - from Stephanie Coontz, to Heather Mac Donald - Pearlstein ruminates on the political, social, and spiritual fallout of this trend. In honest and frank conversations, Pearlstein and his interviewees fearlessly diagnose the problems that many have been too timid to explore and suggest ways to reverse these trends that threaten our social fabric.
Mitch Pearlstein is an admitted conservative who’s suspicious of party labels; a man so out of kilter with his times that he actually believes he can learn from those with whom he disagrees. He has much to say, but his big idea in this particular book is engaging carefully with what forty other people (including me, another mark of his good taste) have to say. Pearlstein is the guy I’d choose six days a week and twice on Sunday to write an important book on America’s most urgent problem: family fragmentation. And who, thank goodness, has written such a book.