Rating: 
Summary: Why does nostalgia bother this author?
Review: This book is an attempt, albeit a feeble one, to take a gentler time in America and somehow demonize it by begging the question and nit-picking. To say life was better in that time is to state an obvious truth and I wonder why Ms. Coontz feels the need to somehow try and show us that today we are "so much better off." Drug abuse, kids killing and having kids, abortions, teen suicide, are the order of our day today. At least in the 1950's most folks had some reference to the whole. Now it seems we don't care who we hurt as long as we get what we want and get it NOW.There is no use trying to elevate today by tearing down yesterday. The plain truth is that the 1950's were in many ways a better time no matter how this author wants to twist statistics and figures and I bet that way down deep beyond the pseudo-intellectual, politically correct veneer, the author knows it was too.
Rating: 
Summary: A fascinating study of American family life
Review: This book is by turns enlightening and astounding. Coontz takes on the pervasive myths surrounding the American Family (tm) and shows how the generalizations many of us take for granted don't tell the whole story. From the idyllic legends of the 1950s, to the role of feminism and other civil rights movements, to the persistent (and often ugly) myths surrounding the families of minorities--Coontz tackles them all, with persuasive arguments and an almost mind-numbing amount of data. She suggests strongly that it isn't family life itself that's the problem, but our own attitudes to it and our responses to far-reaching changes that can be traced back to the 19th century and beyond. Among her more provocative assertions is the statement that our image of the "ideal" 1950s nuclear family is far more myth than fact; in fact, she says, the nuclear family was itself an anomaly, offset both before and after by very different ways of life. The core of Coontz's argument seems to be that family life is shaped far more by social and economic forces than by any ideals we may hold. Corollary to this is the compelling argument that the very values of individual striving and success, so cherished in American culture, both contributed to the development of the nuclear family and to its disintegration. Agree or disagree--Coontz definitely has an agenda, and it often shows--this book is well worth reading, if only because it will make you re-examine some of your own assumptions about what many have taken to be the core structure of American life.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Way Of Relating History
Review: This book is dazzling in its research and disturbing in its revelations. As such, it's certain to rattle right-wing curmudgeons and other nostalgia-minded propagandists. The book is meant to reveal the plain truth about America, from its dispelling of the myths of "self-reliance" in the original 13 Colonies, to its disclosure of the capitalist profit motives fueling the so-called Sexual Revolutions of the 1920s and 1970s. No American citizen should be without a copy in any election year as the blowhard candidates posture and distort, and no social studies or civics class can afford to exclude it from their Required Reading lists. Congratulations to a great popular social historian.
Rating:
Summary: The Way We Still Should Be
Review: This book rambles and has more references than the Library of Congress which leaves the reader laboring to stay focused long enough to understand the author's main thesis-that the idealized 1950's-Ozzie-and-Harriet-type families never really existed. But the typical Baby Boomer does indeed remember days when one could walk home from a school where you actually learned something and without being assaulted, kidnapped or raped on the way and then could eat dinner with all family members present. Such a reader hungers for specific reasons why these families no longer exist and how the author could claim they never did. The author doesn't provide an answer but instead journeys back to Victorian and Colonial Days to say "see the government always subsidized houses and roads so nothing has changed." Not only is that not relevant but it does not make illegitimate those wonderful 1950's families that did indeed exist. Also she makes no distinction between the government's spending on a worthy industrious person like a returning veteran to help buy a house and employing the reverse Darwinism of liberals who throw money at crackheads to pump out more crack babies and worthless schools which produce graduates who can't read their diplomas etc. Hey professor, its WHAT you subsidize and thus create that matters!-in those days nice families, today dysfunctional ones! Some of her utterances are laughable like the notion that the rise of premarital sex has decreased prostitution. In reality the destruction of the traditional two-parent morally upright family has, among other bad things led to BOTH an increase in premarital sex AND prostitution. Witness the present-day army of crack whores who roam the streets and the massage parlors on every other block. Who does she think makes up their ranks? Why the valueless, drug-succeptible, no-individual-responsibility-required, latchkey, ritalin-dosed, Columbine-disposed products of today's typical liberal-created dysfunctional families. The author advocates various taxing schemes to solve the problems of these same compromised families not realizing that the present confiscatory taxes which require both parents AND the children to work just to keep a roof are among the primary reasons why strong 1950's-type middle class families can't exist anymore. Finally few who remember the 1950's can deny that despite some of the bad things that were going on then things really were better in a hundred ways the listing of which is beyond the scope of this review. If the professor thinks things haven't changed since the 1950's let her send her's or a friend's 10-year-old five blocks away to the grocery store without fear.
Rating:
Summary: The Way I Don't Recall It
Review: This book should come with a warning label that it is mediocre family history wrapped in up politically correct sociology. It probably does validate the experience of too many readers who grew up (or have lived)under circumstances of psychic pain, but for the rest of us who immediately recognize and appreciate what Coontz says has never existed, the book is a wordy agenda for adaptation to social decline. Hint: I am from the government and here to help you.
Rating: 
Summary: Thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy
Review: This is a great book. Especially in this day when the backlash against non-traditional families is so palpable, we need to re-examine if this ideal even ever existed. What the book does is just that. It blasts the mythos surrounding the ideal of the dad as ultimate authority, the happy stay at home mom, and the 2.5 children. Once you read the book you start to question if there ever was a norm...and that's what we need to tell Washington. You can idealize the fifties and the "traditional family" all you want, but what you're trying to tell us never existed...go out and buy a clue! But first, buy this book
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: yearn for the golden days of a simpler life? no you don't, cause it never existed. have fond memories of a fun childhood, with friends and families, and a moralistic society? no you don't, cause it never existed. this is an excellent wake up call of a book. well researched. gives a historical perspective on families and what life was really like. the question of our memories and if we really have any is a topic for another book. in the meantime read this one.
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