Customer Reviews

A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values

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I really enjoyed this book by Gillis. I particulary found the idea of, the family we live by versus the family we live with, interesting. I used this book to write a research paper on the social construction of family photographs. Are the images the photograph imply real? Is it an image the family has constructed on purpose? Gillis has made a lot of intersting points in this book and everyone should read it.

This thoughtful and orginal book is well written and fascinating. It incorporates a wide historiography into a brief and cogent synthesis while making its main points. Whether you are a scholar of the history of the family, a student writing a research paper or just someone interested in interogating your own family myths, this book would be very useful.

This book often reads like a textbook and goes into a great deal of detail, which can be trying, and I found myself skipping entire sections by the time I got to the last few chapters. Meanwhile, the author seems to be pulling together information from so many sources that he can't feasibly explain throughout his writing where his statements are coming from -- instead, they're simply stated and endnoted, which left me repeatedly skeptical of how solidly he had founded his theories, or even what could be counted as theory vs. fact. Then again, I find myself repeatedly referencing information that I learned in this book in my everyday life, since it does very clearly make the point that our conceptions of what family *should* be are startlingly recent constructions, as are our conceptions of what family *used* to be. I'm not entirely convinced, though, that it successfully synthesizes all of this research into the grand theory that I think the author's striving for. Either way, though, the book is eye-opening.

A nifty aside: in reading the book on the train platform, the picture of Santa Claus on the cover caused a boy in a stroller next to me to spontaneously start singing Christmas carols in the middle of May. I'm pretty sure his mom had no idea what was going on.

This book really helped me compare the ideal family today to the ways families were centuries ago. There is a lot of abstract talk about family and religion, but there are also hard facts in this book. Quite interesting!