The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood - Rilegato

Mintz, Steven

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674047672 ISBN 13: 9780674047679

Casa editrice: Belknap Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.

The Prime of Life puts today’s challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.

Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood’s joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood’s realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.

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Recensione:

"The Prime of Life" is a compelling story of just how much the meaning and process of attaining adulthood has changed throughout the history of the United States. Mintz does a masterful job of narration and interpretation, reminding readers why he is the preeminent historian of the life course. --Frank F. Furstenberg, author of "Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teenage Childbearing"

"Mintz s project, then, is to reintroduce the idea of adulthood as a historical artefact, a trajectory shaped by contingent and specific socio-economic circumstances. He does this by providing an elegant survey of recent academic research into cognate matters such as population growth, religious teaching, war and wages, out of which he constructs a detailed account of how people mostly Americans but Britons too have historically negotiated the years between 15 and 65 [...] Mintz is eloquent on how discontinuities and reversal, rather than stasis or advancement, have been the historical lot of the grown-up. The death of a spouse, the collapse of a bank, chronic ill-health all those familiar motors of the classic novel, in fact could entail a dramatic forfeiture of what once seemed like a fully secured maturity. --The Guardian

This original and comprehensive book interestingly sets the far-reaching changes in contemporary adulthood in historical perspective." --Times Higher Education

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Belknap Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674047672
• ISBN 13: 9780674047679
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 409