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Rating: 
Summary: Worth your time - no matter your feelings about marriage
Review: A good balanced view of marriage in a modern social context and analysis of how the family unit has been affected over time. Wilson covers a lot of ground here - and the only complaint I have is that it didn't feel very cohesive - lots of skipping around. But there is a lot of meat that will keep you thinking. Wilson is fascinated with marriage rates over time, across cultures, and among different races - but he's concerned with the plight of children. His argument of why children do much better in a marriage setting, like all of the book, is heavily documented and well written. His analysis of the sex ratio (number of men per hundred women) I found totally interesting. The ratio has changed a lot over time because of wars that kill off men - immigration which usually means that more men than women will move to another country - prison populations which draw men out of society - etc. Wilson looks at how differing sex ratios effect family arrangements like polygyny as well as general sexual behavior between men and women and mating patterns. The author examines the role shame & stigma played in the past in ensuring that marriages last and that families care for their children, and compares that with today's more open attitude towards personal decisions. "Our society has managed to stigmatize stigma so much so that we are reluctant to blame people for any act that does not appear to inflict an immediate and palpable harm on someone else. We wrongly suppose, I think, that shame is the enemy of personal emancipation when in fact an emancipated man or woman is one for whom inner control is sufficiently powerful to produce inner limits on actions that once were controlled by external forces. A truly free man or woman is a person whose actions are controlled by gyroscopes rather than opportunities." He has a very even-handed section on the effects of day-care on children involving differing scientific studies. Subchapters include "If marriage is good, why is it in trouble?", "Jealousy", "The Effects of Divorce Laws", "The Shotgun Marriage", Does Welfare Cause Dependency", and "The Victorian Interlude" among others. Wilson's bent can be summed up in his words - "Family, though the smallest and seemingly most fragile of institutions is proving itself to be humankind's bedrock as well as its fault line."
Rating:
Summary: Worth your time - no matter your feelings about marriage
Review: A good balanced view of marriage in a modern social context and analysis of how the family unit has been affected over time. Wilson covers a lot of ground here - and the only complaint I have is that it didn't feel very cohesive - lots of skipping around. But there is a lot of meat that will keep you thinking. Wilson is fascinated with marriage rates over time, across cultures, and among different races - but he's concerned with the plight of children. His argument of why children do much better in a marriage setting, like all of the book, is heavily documented and well written. His analysis of the sex ratio (number of men per hundred women) I found totally interesting. The ratio has changed a lot over time because of wars that kill off men - immigration which usually means that more men than women will move to another country - prison populations which draw men out of society - etc. Wilson looks at how differing sex ratios effect family arrangements like polygyny as well as general sexual behavior between men and women and mating patterns. The author examines the role shame & stigma played in the past in ensuring that marriages last and that families care for their children, and compares that with today's more open attitude towards personal decisions. "Our society has managed to stigmatize stigma so much so that we are reluctant to blame people for any act that does not appear to inflict an immediate and palpable harm on someone else. We wrongly suppose, I think, that shame is the enemy of personal emancipation when in fact an emancipated man or woman is one for whom inner control is sufficiently powerful to produce inner limits on actions that once were controlled by external forces. A truly free man or woman is a person whose actions are controlled by gyroscopes rather than opportunities." He has a very even-handed section on the effects of day-care on children involving differing scientific studies. Subchapters include "If marriage is good, why is it in trouble?", "Jealousy", "The Effects of Divorce Laws", "The Shotgun Marriage", Does Welfare Cause Dependency", and "The Victorian Interlude" among others. Wilson's bent can be summed up in his words - "Family, though the smallest and seemingly most fragile of institutions is proving itself to be humankind's bedrock as well as its fault line."
Rating: 
Summary: author doesn't understand simple social concepts
Review: I can't believe that this shortsighted anti-human rights rhetoric found its way into print. The author sees every single concept as a black and white issue, and eagerly places everybody into his self-devised stereotypical categories. I am convinced that the author doesn't have the faintest clue about what's behind poverty in the U.S. or the complexity of women's issues. The book is full of self-congratulatory moralizing about the "rightness" of marriage, while ignoring the reality of low-wage jobs that make certain men not very good marital partners. I couldn't believe when the author assumed that all his readers would agree with him in judging the 1960s as an embarrassingly evil and immoral decade. Human rights, women's rights, civil rights? The evil cause of social breakdown? Get a handle on reality. Pass this book up. There are many other GOOD resources that address poverty, family, and relationships. This book is a shameful apology for a no-brainer conservative policy which makes marriage the ultimate solution for every social problem.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: This is an excellent work into the problems of our society. whether we agree as to the true causes or not, families are being torn apart, and the institution of family is changing in america. I agree with much of what Wilson states about the structure of the divorce system being a big part of the problem. it is far too easy to divorce. it also doesn't demand as much of a punishment/sacrifice as it used to. therefore, if one is unhappy with his or her spouse, there are plenty others out there to wed. We must not allow the family unit to disintegrate. once that happens, we are a lost and fallen society.
Rating:
Summary: 1st Problem: Quoting Disraeli to describe the US today
Review: Wilson confuses the civil order problem of providing children with a caring and responsible up-bringing, with moral concerns about marriage and personal relationships. The first is the proper concern of government, and the second is properly left to our private consciences and sensibilities. Wilson is confused by enlightened freedom, and wants to impose an older repressive order which he sentimentally imagines was better. Anna Karenina and A Doll's House are searing; Lovers and Other Strangers is funny. The society in which he works is wealthier, stronger, healthier, more humane and prouder than any the world has seen, and it is more moral. Every child left out is a problem, of course. The solutions begin with recognizing what the government can do- provide incentives and supports for parents to provide a good 18-22 years of loving (relying on the natural bond of parents) care-- and what it should not-- bind husbands and wives together against their will. Wilson is hard for me to read because as a political scientist he subverts the genius of the Constitutional framers who took religion and the personal (i.e. sex, which is inseparately entangled with religion), out of government, leaving us free to find true salvation and true love. Political science is a very "American" profession, and Wilson should understand better how a limited government has steered our society away from the zero-sum dilemmas that have plagued the societies of the past, including the Islamic one Americans once escaped, and now find themselves confronting.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book!
Review: Wilson's excellent book sumarizes the findings of virtually all of the factual studies of the consequences of divorce and illigitmacy for children and for American society done over the past decade and more.
Those reviewers who have traduced the author are precisely the kind of ultra feminist ideologues who for over a decade have been denying the facts, ignoring the consequences, touting the tired old 60's rhetoric of rights without responsibilities, continuing to insist against all the empirical evidence that divorce is good for the children, and, all in all, burying their heads in rhetorical sand because the reality of the world they have made doesn't square with the prognostications of their ideology.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book!
Review: Wilson's work is a rather impressive synthesis of the current empirical social-science research on family, children, and the social forces affecting them. He rightly notes that children are being adversely affected by the decline in the strength of marriage, and attempts to fashion why this decline has occured in the first place. (To the above reviewers, who obviously read the book from a ideological and political perspective, nearly ALL rigorous social-science research has shown that children are better off in almost every way in two-parent families. This cannot be denied.) His analysis is cogent, coherent, and, moreover compelling enough to require some reflection on the matter. In essence he sees the decline of marriage resulting from an interplay of three variables -- the sex ratio, economic development, and the steady liberalization of Western culture. He does not, in any way, say that economic growth or liberal culture is bad, but, rather notes that the slow death of marriage in the west is a cost we've paid for the many benefits we've derived from our particular economic and cultural arrangements. While his synthesis is impressive, what he lacks is a sophisticated method for testing his theory. At best, he uses a loose, journalistic, comparative case study method in examining his theory. This, unfortunately, does little to provide the reader with conclusive evidence that Wilson is right. At best, Wilson's work is a great read for the interested layman, at worst, a half-finished social-science tome that needs more rigorous methodological tools to prove his thesis. It nonetheless is an intersting analysis of why marriage has declined in our society.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting work, but needs more rigor
Review: Wilson's work is a rather impressive synthesis of the current empirical social-science research on family, children, and the social forces affecting them. He rightly notes that children are being adversely affected by the decline in the strength of marriage, and attempts to fashion why this decline has occured in the first place. (To the above reviewers, who obviously read the book from a ideological and political perspective, nearly ALL rigorous social-science research has shown that children are better off in almost every way in two-parent families. This cannot be denied.) His analysis is cogent, coherent, and, moreover compelling enough to require some reflection on the matter. In essence he sees the decline of marriage resulting from an interplay of three variables -- the sex ratio, economic development, and the steady liberalization of Western culture. He does not, in any way, say that economic growth or liberal culture is bad, but, rather notes that the slow death of marriage in the west is a cost we've paid for the many benefits we've derived from our particular economic and cultural arrangements. While his synthesis is impressive, what he lacks is a sophisticated method for testing his theory. At best, he uses a loose, journalistic, comparative case study method in examining his theory. This, unfortunately, does little to provide the reader with conclusive evidence that Wilson is right. At best, Wilson's work is a great read for the interested layman, at worst, a half-finished social-science tome that needs more rigorous methodological tools to prove his thesis. It nonetheless is an intersting analysis of why marriage has declined in our society.
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