Customer Reviews

Composing a Life (Plume)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read Mary Catherine Bateson's book COMPOSING A LIFE when it was first issued some years ago. I had read her mother's biography BLACKBERRY WINTER, and I wanted to know more about the child raised by the woman who wrote COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA. Bateson's mother was married three times -- twice to anthropologists, including Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine's father and Margaret Mead's third husband.

I was pleasantly surprised by Mary Catherine's strong individual personality and the inspirational tone of her book. Bateson definitely escaped her parents shadow. Having famous parents who study other people's children doesn't mean your life will be perfect or easy. Mary Catherine had to find her own way and compose her own life. Finding her way meant "stepping outside the box" or realizing that she could make choices at any point. She did not have to conform to society's notion of the phases of life (maybe her mother's study of "coming of age" had some effect on her novel thinking?).

Bateson's book helped me to think about my own life differently. I found the courage to go back to school at age 28 (I was a high school dropout with three small children), earn a B.A., M.A. and complete all the coursework for a PhD. Today, I am a a subject matter expert for one of the Federal Government's leading statistical agencies. At age 28, I had no idea how far I could go, or that I even wanted to go there. Mary Catherine Bateson was one of those pioneering women who helped me realize it is possible to change your life.

"Composing a Life" is a critically reflecting book on the lives of five women and the challenges they are faced with during their life roles.

Mary Catherine Bateson has woven together several cross-functional areas of study including psychology, anthropology,multi-national studies, and behavioral sciences to explain the societal, ethnic, and economical pressures that women feel in the varying (and ambiguous) roles in their life.

This is not a male-bashing book yet one that carefully explains the external and internal forces of women as they wear several hats as professionals, mothers, girlfriends, wives, lovers, and friends. Just as music can rapidly change in tempo or keys, so can the lives of women and the expectation of immediate adjustment and acclamation.

A five-star book. Easy to read and great to reflect upon and journal your thoughts as they springboard from this introspective book.

This very thoughtful and subtle book is good for just about anyone to read, although it particularly recounts the contemporary lives of five women. Mary Catherine Bateson is the daughter of two of the greatest of anthropologists, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and her capacity for insight shines through. There is something energizing and exciting about seeing the quandries of modern life with perspective. We are not the first to have days filled with adversity and challenge, all the while trying to live in a way that does justice to ourselves and our world. You will hear about Joan Erikson, wife of Eric Erickson and an artist, a college president, an engineer in the business world, and Bateson herself. The interviews and observations span decades, but are so intriguing you find yourself thinking "and what happens next?" It's nearly impossible to write a book about decades of personal life, and see the kernels of wisdom about how we make personal decisions and deal with adversity, but it's here. In one elegantly slim volume. I'm sending it to one friend of 20 years, one of 40 and one of 80 this week.

This is a well-written and well thought out book. The reason I give it three stars is for its very limited focus. Bateson leads the reader to believe that we will learn about different life choices, different stories, and different outcomes from the women she followed. We don't. All of the women she follows are upper middle class or above; they are either academics themselves or swimming in the same pond as professors; all of them (with one exception) have children, a husband, and access to everything life has to offer.

These are interesting stories, but from an anthropologist's daughter I expected more. Why not expand the research to include a few women who were faced with welfare, or violence, or non-conformist husbands or children? Women who had no access to education and still managed to "compose a life" despite terrible hardship? Women who propelled themselves into jobs or environments no one would have expected? Anything really...to give this book variety.

How can we truly learn how to "compose a life" unless we've seen many different ways to do so? This book is only inspirational to blessed upper middle class "liberals" who are within Bateson's own sphere. While it could have been great, it was only so-so.

I was quite pleased to have accidentally stumbled onto this book in a search to find materials focused on the concept of "corporate anthopology". Like Ayn Rand's ability to model her concepts of epistemology in her fictional novels, Mary Catherine exemplifies the work of a cultural anthropologist by sharing her personal observations of her own life and the lives of others. I was so sparked by the "personal jewels" I was unable to uncover for my own use that I can't wait to follow on to read her next book, which I've just ordered online...

I really wanted to love this book. It came highly recommended. The first 15 pages were great--I thought this would be a seminal read. But then things took a nosedive. Ultimately, this book felt to me like a self-indulgent intellectual ramble, and excuse for author to vent her bitterness toward Amherst College and get even by airing her story. (Which she has every right to do, but I thought I was reading a different book.) In the end, my only takeaway is that wearing multiple hats, perhaps in succession, can be a positive thing. I still don't understand what the plight of the homeless has to do with figurative improvisation. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to appreciate the nuances--but I definitely didn't. Original? Yes. Uplifting/inspiring? Nope. I really tried!

This book examines the lives of five of the author's friends, all highly educated, high-achieveing women from the East Coast who went through the normal ups and downs of life that the rest of us share. It is well written, but the focus is so tight--how many of us get entangled with academic politics at elite Eastern colleges?--that is tells more about the writer and her choice of similar friends than about the rest of us. It does a fine job of focusing on issues of gender and race of 20 years ago.

The author examines how five women of intelligence, creativity and vision composed their lives.

Bateson discusses the traditional ways of viewing life as a single uninterrupted strand from beginning to end. Instead of viewing life this way, she chooses to define life's journey as enriched by tangents, change and rerouting. She makes the case that women's work has prepared them for this. Women cook, read, pursue professional goals, raise families - - all at the same time. Women are eclectic and are accustomed to being up-rooted.

Bateson sees the new age as one that requires this kind of preparedness and skill. She discusses how derailment usually can be viewed as beneficial whereas traditional views stress certainty and defined continuity. This is an interesting thesis and she has chosen interesting women to make her point. Parts of the book are repetitive but, overall, it is very interesting and thought-provoking

I first started to read what Ms. Bateson wrote because it was advertised as a life story of her famous mother Margaret Mead. Soon I was looking for everything that Ms. Bateson wrote. I found her view of her famous parents intriguing. What she told about growing up with "working parents" is certainly relevant in today's world.

I have only one negative comment to offer to Mary Catherine Bateson. In the very descriptive narrative about her father's life she delineates in detail his opinions and theories about schitzophrenia. More recent medical research has shown that the theories of mental illness that blame the family and in particular the "mother" are totally unfounded. I would appreciate a disclaimer somewhere in the book that mentions much of the modern brain research about schitzophrenia.

Families who have newly discovered this dread disease in their midst need to always have access to the newest scientific findings. Reading the totally out of date theories of Mr. Bateson could be devastating.

I can't remember why I investigated, ordered and then read this book other than it was written by Margaret Mead's daughter and I wanted to find out what the woman was like personally. What I found when I read the book was quite different. I felt such affinity with much that was presented about the lives of the women that I recommended the work to a friend. It is interesting that we both highlighted an event in Mary Bateson's life that we both had experienced in similar intensity. Bateson's candid verbalisation of the effect of the experience has helped to heal the wounds in both my friend and myself.