The Book of Marriage: The Wisest Answers to the Toughest Questions (Religion, Marriage, and Family Series.)

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Summary: I already did!!
Review: I sent you a review a week ago and am still awaiting its appearance!! Bill Muehlenberg

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Summary: Truth at Last
Review: Todays high school and college textbooks address the concept of marriage as if this most precious and natural of all relationships between a man and a woman is now a relic, a trap, an alternative lifestyle, or something to be avoided in a post-modern world centered on self-fulfillment and utter individual independence since our "modern" philosophy must be "if it feels good, just do it".

David Blankenhorn for more than a decade has studied and often spoken at national conferences about today's national tragedy to avert, undermine, destroy and discourage marriage. As President of the Institute for American Values (www.americanvalues.org), he plus most nationally prominent and concerned sociologists, psychologists, family researchers and public policy analysts have studied and analyzed root causes and outcomes within our nation that have compromised us as a healthy and enduring culture.

Bursting on the scene in Atlantic Monthly (April 93) with the landmark essay "Dan Quayle Was Right", fellow researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, first exposed stunning root causes. Years later, Maggie Gallagher extended the analysis in her remarkable book "The Abolition of Marriage - How We Destroy Lasting Love".

Thus began David's quest for corrective action by exploring drivers and new means to address an intergenerational crisis on the verge of spiraling out of control, since the alternative to no action and fresh insights would be the very death of marriage.

IAV identified the purposeful sad state of marriage education and marriage textbooks as being a major contributor. Analysis of existing textbooks on marriage raises serious questions about the political and social agenda publishers pursue for the sake of political correctness.

Poor textbooks for marriage education, coupled with a mass media and press openly hostile and dismissive towards most people who choose or are committed to marriage has bred serious antagonism and low expectations towards this most natural of all relationships.

The Book of Marriage is a new and bright beacon in a dark night. The editors gather some of the deepest, wittiest, and most edifying perspectives on the big questions of married life. Each chapter in this morally rich, ideologically balanced anthology introduces a different quandary of marriage, and then culls the best from ancient and modern writing on the theme.

Thus it provides youth and adults with positive information, much hope and solid guidance for having a successful marriage. More than a textbook, it is a stunning book of honest history, insights and antidotes, offering wisdom and hope, while celebrating the diversity and essential humanity of the marriage experience. This is a roadmap for everyone serious about teaching marriage education, seeking instruction for a lasting marriage, or growing through love and devotion in a durable living marriage. Eminently useful, The Book of Marriage is also entertaining. How wonderfully are connected the thoughts of Leo Tolstoy to John Milton, Bertrand Russell with Martin Luther, to the views of Franz Kafka and Euripides, with wisdom from The Qur'an, Holy Bible and William Shakespeare on marriage.

Dana Mack and David Blankenhorn draw upon secular and faith based lessons from history while adding their fresh words of wisdom to revive mankinds enduring notion that marriage is not only healthy for most all adults as a way of life, but it is the very best way we can raise our children, and then joyfully grow old together in an enduring nation.

Such is the truth about marriage.

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Summary: In Praise of Marriage
Review: What's so special about marriage? All relationships are of equal value. Marriage is an outdated and unnecessary institution. These and other objections to marriage are commonly heard today. Indeed, in a culture where history is devalued and morality is mocked, marriage, like so many other great traditions, is seen as passe. But marriage is not so easily disposed of. In fact, marriage is much more of a universal and long-standing tradition than many might expect. Marriage has been the norm of most cultures though-out most of human history.

It is in response to our historical and intellectual myopia that this book is written. Dane Mack and David Blankenhorn have assembled in one volume some of the most profound, most witty, and most incisive comments on marriage available. Poet and philosophers, theologians and historians, sociologists and playwrights - all are found in this anthology of writings on the beauty and wonder, the joys and frustrations, of this much maligned institution.

Short pithy articles come from a wide range of sources: the Koran and the Bible, Aristotle and Erasmus, Homer and Chaucer, Milton and Kafka, George Bernard Shaw and Viktor Frankl, Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther. The breadth of diversity and the wide coverage of disciplines does not spoil the unity of this book. Marriage, warts and all, is given a new and invigorating appraisal.

The Book of Marriage is a welcome antidote to the scepticism and criticism marriage has taken over recent years. It inspires and challenges, as well as informs and motivates. If you want one book to encourage you in your marriage, to give as a gift, or to simply enjoy in whatever state you find yourself in, this is it.