Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 352
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-8476-8380-2 • Paperback • October 1998 • $21.00 • (£15.99) - Currently out of stock. Copies will arrive soon.
Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3 Introduction
Part 4 Part I. The Problem: Family Breakdown and Its Relation to Progress
Chapter 5 In Disarray: The American Family Approaching Year 2000
Chapter 6 The Future at Risk: The Consequences of Family Breakdown
Chapter 7 Why Conventional Explanations Are Incomplete
Chapter 8 The Crucial Role of the Ideology of Progress
Part 9 Part II. The Paradox: Rise and Fall of the Idea of Progress
Chapter 10 How the Process Gave Rise to the Idea
Chapter 11 The First Great Predicament of Progress
Chapter 12 A "Horrible Capacity for Mass Annihilation"
Chapter 13 Limits-to-Growth Predicaments
Chapter 14 The Fundamental Predicament of Progress
Chapter 15 Decline and Fall of the Idea of Progress
Part 16 Part III. The Battle: The War Over Family Values
Chapter 17 Family Values: Evolution or Revolution? A Major Battleground: Self vs. Posterity
Chapter 18 Equality, Family Advantages, and Moral Relativism
Chapter 19 Reclaiming the Family: Principles and Programs
Chapter 20 We Can Act, But Will We?
A wise, wide-ranging and penetrating analysis of why marriage and the nuclear family in America are in such trouble, and what we can do about it.
— David Popenoe, author of Life Without Father, Promises to Keep, and Disturbing the Nest
No one who reads Posterity Lost will fail to learn from it.
— David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America
A tour de force analysis of the current woes that have beset the American family
— Brigitte Berger, Boston University
A subtle and deeply troubling analysis of the remarkable changes in family life in the past 30 years, and the concurrent uneasiness that is so widespread in contemporary society, despite our great economic, scientific and technological successes. It's a very good book.
— Nathan Glazer, Harvard University School of Education
Gill has written a book of the first importance about the central concern of American society, the sudden, unprecedented, altogether unanticipated collapse of the 'traditional' family structure. A superbly insightful work.
— Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Posterity Lost will be one of the most influential treatments of family change in this decade.
— Norval D. Glenn; American Journal of Sociology
Gill has wonderful insights sprinkled throughout the book, page after page.
— Patrick Fagan, William H. Fitzgerald Fellow, The Heritage Foundation; Crisis
—Identifies, for the first time, Americans' diminishing faith in the future as the fundamental cause of the family's disintegration
—Synthesizes a wealth of statistical, economic, cultural, and political evidence to demonstrate the cause of a loss of confidence in our future
—Depicts trends in American culture through easy-to-read figures and tables