Distant Father Research Articles

Parent–child relationship trajectories during adolescence: Longitudinal associations with romantic outcomes in emerging adulthood

This study examined the developmental trajectories of parent–child relationships in adolescence, especially with respect to changes in support levels and negativity, and analyzed if and how these trajectories were associated with the subsequent quality of romantic relationships in young adulthood. A sample of 145 German subjects was followed across six waves (i.e., ages 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, and 23 years). Growth mixture modeling revealed three developmental trajectories of parent–child relationships across adolescence (i.e., normative, increasingly negative, and decreasingly negative/distant), which were associated with the quality of romantic outcomes at two times in emerging adulthood. Earlier mother–adolescent relationships were distinctively linked with connectedness and sexual attraction experienced in young adults' romantic relationships. Distant father–child relationships during adolescence were linked with the child's later anxious love.

'My brain made me do it' - how neuroscience may change the insanity defence

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Merlino-Perkins Father-Daughter Relationship Inventory (MP-FDI): Construction, Reliability, Validity, and Implications for Counseling and Research

The Merlino—Perkins Father—Daughter Relationship Inventory, a self-report instrument, assesses women s childhood interactions with supportive, doting, distant, controlling, tyrannical, physically abusive, absent, and seductive fathers. Item and scale development, psychometric findings drawn from factor analyses, reliability assessments, and validation processes are presented along with implications for counseling and research.

Life-Stories and Storied Lives: Genre and Reports of Lived Experience in Gay Personal Literature

ABSTRACT Personal literature may be written either as a life story such as an autobiography or memoir or as an autobiographical novel. Using the three volumes comprising the memoir of author Paul Monette and the three volumes comprising the autobiographical fiction trilogy of journalist and novelist Edmund White, this article explores the goal of each author for selecting a particular genre in which to write about lived experience. Each author enjoyed an elite education and came to adulthood in postwar America in the decade prior to the gay rights era beginning in the 1970s, and each writer participated in the sociosexual culture emerging over the succeeding decade. Each writer became HIV+ in the 1980s (Monette died of complications attending AIDS in 1995), and each writer experienced the loss of his lover to AIDS. While Monette and White each experienced the anti-gay prejudice of postwar American society, Monette's youth was less troubled than that of White who grew up in a complex family with a distant yet harsh father toward whom he was also sexually attracted. While Monette's goal in writing a memoir was that the suffering of his generation of gay men should be remembered, White's goal was more personal, choosing autobiographical fiction in his effort to overcome his feelings of shame about being gay founded on his desire for his father.

Complexities in Research on Fathering: Illustrations from the Tufts Study of Young Fathers

Theory and research suggest that the transition to parenthood is a major life transition, and that adaptation to the parenting role is influenced by a complex set of factors, including the relationship with the child's mother, family of origin, and how the father is situated within sociocultural contexts. The father–]mother relationship is particularly important for men making the transition to fatherhood. This study examined patterns of fathering among young fathers (15–24 years) and investigated how fathers' relationships with the mothers of their young children (infants and toddlers) were related to fathering. In general, higher quality father–mother relationships were related to greater father involvement with children; when mothers were perceived as barriers to involved fathering fathers also had less accurate and adaptive parenting knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Person-centered analyses revealed quite complex relations between father–mother relationships and father–child interaction. One pattern showed strong positive father–mother relationships associated with a disengaged pattern of father–child interaction, while another pattern showed sensitive and positive father–child engagement in the context of negative or distant father–mother relationships. Four patterns of association between fathering and mother–father relationships were demonstrated. Results highlight the complexity of understanding fathering and family relationships among young fathers.

The Lion Hunter: The Mark of Solomon Book One. (review)

Reviewed by: The Lion Hunter: The Mark of Solomon Book One Karen Coats Wein, Elizabeth E. The Lion Hunter: The Mark of Solomon Book One. Viking, 2007227p ISBN 0-670-06163-8$16.99 R Gr. 7-12 It is with unbridled pleasure that readers will return to Wein's Aksumite empire of the sixth century (from The Sunbird, BCCB 5/04, etc.). Our hero Telemakos is visiting the emperor's mostly tame lions while awaiting the birth of his sister; when news of her arrival comes, he unwisely runs across the pit, causing the male lion to attack. He lives, but infection results in the loss of his arm at the shoulder, and his wounds fester in the hearts of his parents as well, estranging them from his infant sister. Telemakos, though a picture of waking resilience, is plagued by nightmares, not of the wounds given him by his beloved lion but by memories of the torture inflicted when he was spying for the emperor and his aunt Goewin, the British ambassador, in the salt mines. When it becomes clear that not all of the traitors to the emperor's quarantine have been caught and that they are still looking to avenge themselves on the spy, Telemakos is sent to study with his uncle in the royal court at Himyar, where he uncovers a plot that will pit his well-honed talent for espionage against his genuine affection for his new home and his instincts for self-preservation. Telemakos grows more and more likable as his vulnerabilities [End Page 490] surface behind his childlike springiness; his devotion to his sister, his desire for a less distant father, and his determination to overcome the residual effects of his imprisonment render him humble and accessible despite the fact that he is clearly exceptional, even kingly, at twelve years of age. After the lion attack shatters the quiet domesticity to which Telemakos has returned after his earlier adventures, Wein keeps the tension quiveringly high even at moments of rest and relative calm; readers sense that Telemakos must never again make the mistake of complacency in the presence of those who are only mostly tame, be they lions or men. Sequel to follow—quickly, one hopes. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery (review)

Reviewed by: Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery Peter Keating (bio) Michael Bliss. Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery University of Toronto Press. xii, 591. $50.00 Trigeminal neuralgia or 'tic douleureux' results from pressure on the fifth cranial nerve and is expressed as intense in the anatomic sites irrigated by [End Page 499] that nerve, namely, the eyes, lips, nose, scalp, forehead, and jaw. The pain, described as electric-shock-like by sufferers, is so intense that early sufferers occasionally committed suicide. Although the pressure on the nerve may have a variety of common causes such as infection or tumour, the disease itself is relatively rare, affecting no more than five in a hundred thousand individuals per year. Even with that low rate of incidence, however, tic douloureux comprises 5 per cent of neurological disorders and the patient group attached to the disease in the United States, the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association, presently claims over twenty-five thousand members. The subject of Michael Bliss's most recent and scrupulous biography, Harvey Cushing (1869–1939), scored his first success as America's and indeed the world's most famous neurosurgeon of the first half of the twentieth century by inventing a method for surgically separating the cranial nerve from the brain where it enters the spinal cord. Patients have profited ever since. A student and soon-to-be colleague of William Halsted (1852–1922), inventor of the radical mastectomy for breast cancer and noted cocaine addict, at Johns Hopkins, Cushing's work on tic douleureux at the age of thirty solidified what was becoming an enviable reputation for careful yet daring brain surgery. Following postgraduate research in Berne where he made significant observations of the reaction of the brain to compression using dogs and monkeys, Cushing returned to Baltimore to become America's foremost neurosurgeon and to pursue parallel lines of research in brain physiology and brain pathology. There and later as Surgeon-in-Chief of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, he maintained a lifelong interest in the functioning of the endocrine system whose central organ he encountered through the window of the various pathologies of the pituitary gland. At the same time he amassed an enormous collection of tumours arising from the tissues that envelope the brain – meningiomas – that were issued in a monumental eight-hundred-page publication just before his death. Since surgery entails a great deal of craft knowledge, and many procedures can be learned only at the operating table, part of Cushing's formidable reputation is based on the fact that in addition to being an innovator, he was also an excellent and indefatigable operator; he retired only after having completed more than two thousand operations during the course of which he trained an entire generation of brain surgeons. Excluded from that extraordinary number of operations – and it is well to remember that, at the time, many procedures took eight to ten hours to perform – are those carried out during the First World War, where Cushing operated as a front-line surgeon, kept a diary that later become a book, and pioneered the use of electromagnets to extract metallic bodies from the brain. As Cushing's wife remarked while gazing at his sixteen volumes of collected papers: 'Such industry.' [End Page 500] As it turns out and as Bliss records in fine detail, Cushing's wife saw his papers about as often as she saw their author, which wasn't very often. An absent and somewhat distant father, and competitive to a fault, Cushing drove himself and others with an intensity that shocked and astonished his contemporaries. One of his students, Hugh Cairns (1896–1952), who would go on to become professor of surgery at Oxford University, once wrote to his wife complaining of Cushing that: 'He cursed me in front of everyone in the operating room the other day for doing something he had told me to do the previous, and when I protested hotly with, I imagine, blazing eyes, he lied promptly and with perfect technique.' As the Bliss biography makes abundantly clear, Cushing was also a world-class bully. Peter Keating Peter Keating, Department of History, L'université du Québec à Montr...

Daniel Isn't Talking: A Novel

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessDaniel Isn't Talking: A NovelHarriet P. Lefley Ph.D.Harriet P. Lefley Ph.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Dec 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.12.1823AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail An elegant, insightful novel, Daniel Isn't Talking is about raising an autistic child. The experience is one of inordinate pressures, conflicting treatment approaches, disturbed households, and family conflict. The protagonist, Melanie, an American in London, marries an Englishman who is the man of her dreams. The birth of their children, Daniel and Emily, fulfills their dreams. But soon the mother knows something is wrong with Daniel, while the husband persists in denial. The couple fights. The husband withdraws. The marriage sours. A fashionable, carefree young woman becomes a frumpy, obsessive caregiver. This is not a new story. In fact, it is fairly typical when there is mental illness in the family, especially when it involves the unfathomable behavioral disorder of a child. Autism is particularly trying for parents. It is difficult to treat and yields little of the human reciprocity that people expect and need from those they love. And it offers an unpromising future for too many children who, with appropriate resources, may actually be capable of leading productive lives. Not too long ago, "refrigerator parents" and hostile mothers were blamed for causing this condition in their children. The existential wounds were painfully salted by our putative helping professions. Clara Park, mother of an autistic child, once described, "a kind of pain that only those can understand who have lived it, an assault on the most fundamental of animal instincts, the desire to benefit the young creatures one has brought into the world" ( 1 ). This book expresses that pain. It unfolds against a background of now-discredited etiological theories and their effects on a mother crazed with the stressors of incomprehensible behaviors, controversial professional advice, minimal support, and irrational guilt. She rages against child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and charges him with "a humanitarian crime" in his accusations of maternal rejection. Here is a devoted, loving mother who yearns to interact with a child incapable of interacting. Her agonized attempts to cope with his frantic insistence on sameness of objects and rituals, his perseverating behaviors, and his frustrated head banging are graphically portrayed. Melanie desperately tries to understand Daniel's inexpressible needs, to please him, to stop his uncontrollable tantrums, and at the same time not to shortchange the normal sibling vying for her attention.Considering all this, the author cleverly depicts the parents as the classic duo of overinvolved mother and distant father, who have dual family histories of human losses and clinical depression. Reflective of too many case histories, we are offered rich but irrelevant psychodynamic material with no evident specificity for the diagnosis in question. This is real-life stuff.After multiple assessments and trials, Melanie finally discovers a firmly dedicated behavioral therapist. Daniel learns how to speak and even play with others, and the mother's choice is vindicated. We have seen this mother in the clinic and the academic literature. She refuses to accept guarded prognoses, pesters professionals for reassurances they cannot give, reads widely, tries every conceivable traditional and nontraditional therapy, and essentially devotes her life to seeking an elusive cure. She is an annoyance, a royal pain to staff. Treasure her. In her obsessive commitment and zealous search, she just might find the resources that open a life for her child.Dr. Lefley is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.Reference1. Park CC: You Are Not Alone: Understanding and Dealing With Mental Illness. Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1976Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 57Issue 12 December, 2006Pages 1823-1823PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2006 Volume 57 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 December 2006 Published in print 1 December 2006

Witch Catcher (review)

Reviewed by: Witch Catcher April Spisak Hahn, Mary Downing Witch Catcher. Clarion, 2006236p ISBN 0-618-50457-5$16.00 R Gr. 4-6 Jen's father has inherited a mysterious castle in the mountains, and Jen, an adventurous twelve-year-old, can't wait to explore it. She is less thrilled, however, with Dad's new girlfriend, Moura, whom he has been dating on the sly, and with whom he is completely smitten. Already suspicious of Moura (Jen's certain her hypnotizing [End Page 71] perfume is entrancing her father), Jen's convinced that the mysterious glass ball she finds is connected to the woman; after the witch catcher is broken, a quirky fairy girl emerges out of the shards and confirms Jen's suspicions, alerting her to Moura's true witchy self. Now Jen, who had only hoped for a cool new house, is burdened with a lovestruck and suddenly distant father, a family of shape-shifting and untrustworthy fairies who need rescuing, and the dangerous Moura, who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. It is unclear why the witch traps would work as well for fairies as witches (Moura kept the fairy family trapped for years before Jen's arrival), but this is a minor confusion in an otherwise carefully developed fantasy. Realistically squicky detail (there's a great evocation of the way it might feel to be transformed into an ant), elegant descriptions (the swirls of colors in the glass traps are described with particular artistry), and a clever twist that allows the fairies to retain their integrity as tricksters all combine to make this fantasy an intriguing read. Hahn's taut, fast-paced writing style works effectively to sweep readers into the story and keep them engaged until the fairies go home, Moura is stopped, and Jen finally gets her newly appreciated "regular" life back. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Reinterpreting the Inner Self in Global India:‘Malevolent Mothers’, ‘Distant Fathers’ and the Development of Children's Identity

This essay provides an analysis and review of Dinesh Sharma's edited collection Childhood, Family, and Sociocultural Change in India: Reinterpreting The Inner World. The authors in this book provide a retrospective critique of Sudhir Kakar's grand narrative on Hindu psychology and childhood. While recognizing the tremendous intellectual significance of Kakar's book The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, the authors in this collected volume make a case for reanalyzing and rereading this classic work within the contemporary cultural context of India. The review essay is organized around three significant themes of this book: (1) re-imagining the self in global India; (2) mothers, fathers and the development of self in Indian children; and (3) colonization, postcolonial identity and Indian psychology.

My Father the Spy: An Investigative Memoir

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessMy Father the Spy: An Investigative MemoirJaak Rakfeldt Ph.D.Jaak Rakfeldt Ph.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 May 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2006.57.5.738AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Mom calls. Dad's in the hospital, on oxygen. It's his heart. I fly down." Thus begins Richardson's My Father the Spy: An Investigative Memoir about his father the sleuth. The book ends with, "One last trip to the bathroom…. The toilet paper roll is almost empty and that's when he says his last words: 'Another roll.'" The book's almost universal theme is searching for who we really are as people, and one way of doing so is by understanding our parents more fully. Richardson leads us through this odyssey in his carefully researched, often compelling, sometimes funny quest to learn about his CIA station-chief father, also John H. Richardson, who served in Vienna, Manila, Saigon, and Seoul. As a top CIA officer, John H. Richardson, Sr., stonewalls when his son asks him about his job, his life, or anything else by saying, "You know, son, I took an oath of silence." When Richardson contacts the CIA regarding his father's career he receives the official response: "Not only no, but hell no—and if you pursue this, we must contact John Richardson, Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath."Richardson begins and ends his book when his father is dying in Mexico. He uses old letters that his father had written to a friend, diary entries, and interviews with former colleagues as his source material. Richardson Sr. grew up in Whittier, California, and attended Whittier College (Nixon was one year ahead of him). The most surprising thing he learns is that his stiff, straightlaced father, who built a career fighting Communism, had once been a devout romantic, a poet, a wanderer, a dreamer, and a soul-searching, agonized idealist who read voraciously while searching painfully for some kind of spiritual and intellectual deliverance.His father joins the Army during World War II and is selected for a new, top-secret wartime intelligence unit, the Counter Intelligence Service, the precursor to the CIA. Through the Cold War decades, the family moves from post to post. His father is a workaholic, totally absorbed by his mission. Growing up in this family, Richardson and his older sister rebel as teenagers during the tumult of the 1960s. Their acting out, with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and all is an effort to evoke some sort of human reaction from their distant father. They yearn for a relationship with him. The young Richardson details his abuse of alcohol and drugs. One time he got arrested for giving the finger to the military police in Korea. Another time he was escorted in handcuffs out of Hawaii and placed on an airplane. In response to the Hawaii incident Richardson Sr. writes a note to his daughter and states that her brother had arrived unexpectedly from Honolulu on the evening of Christmas Day, that he's in good health, has put on weight, and so on.A major turning point comes when CIA station chief Richardson is abruptly removed from his post in Vietnam after the coup in Saigon. Realizing that his career is essentially over, Richardson Sr. descends into brooding, chain smoking, drinking too much, and popping sleeping pills. All the while he remains aloof, remote, and stoic. About the same time, the younger Richardson experiences an emotional breakdown while in college. Interestingly, this occurs at about the same age that his father had had a "nervous breakdown" years earlier, also while in college. It is during Richardson's breakdown that his father begins to relent, and finally responds to his son's imploring, "I know nothing about you!" His father reluctantly begins writing on "a thin sheet of paper.""Well, to begin the saga at the beginning, with origins…." All is not settled; however, son and father reconcile to some extent and even share a drunken embrace. But his father the spy remains enigmatic, as his final words reveal, dealing merely with needing more toilet paper: "Another roll." This book would be of interest to the readers of Psychiatric Services . It forcefully chronicles the vicissitudes of a complex family's life that unfolds during the last half of the 20th century, with major historical events such as the Cold War and Vietnam framing the contexts. Dr. Rakfeldt is professor in the social work department at Southern Connecticut State University and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale University, both in New Haven, Connecticut. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 57Issue 5 May, 2006Pages 738-738PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES May 2006 Volume 57 Number 5 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 May 2006 Published in print 1 May 2006

Listening at the Gate (review)

Reviewed by: Listening at the Gate April Spisak James, Betsy Listening at the Gate; written and illus. by Betsy James. Atheneum, 2006501p ISBN 0-689-85068-9$16.95 Ad Gr. 9-12 The sequel to the two prior fantasy titles in the Seeker Chronicles (Long Night Dance and Dark Heart) reintroduces Kat, who ran away from home after her emotionally distant father tried to use her as a marriageable pawn in an attempt to improve his social standing. Now seventeen, she is eager to return home, since she is still in love with Nall (whom she left behind when she escaped) and is ready to face her childhood demons. In her absence, however, a cruel overlord has destroyed most of the good things she remembers from home, and a fierce war is brewing between the beleaguered townsfolk and the power-hungry minions of the overlord. There is also a threat from a mysterious third group of people known as the Rigi, who seceded years ago and blame their devastating new illness on the townspeople. As in the previous novels, the main focus is on intensive personality development, which results in complex and interesting characters. Unfortunately, this emphasis also means that the action often takes a backseat to introspective monologues on nothingness, belonging, and destiny. The third in the series reads more like a companion novel than a sequel, as many of the earlier events (Kat's coming-of-age ritual, the reasons for her escape) are not only mentioned but revisited in depth. The result is a poetic, dreamy, and languorous fantasy that may captivate patient readers; prior fans won't mind diving back into this elaborate world and will appreciate the long-awaited romantic connection between the two main characters. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Thicker Than Water (review)

Reviewed by: Thicker Than Water April Spisak Jablonski, Carla Thicker Than Water. Razorbill, 2006 [256p] ISBN 1-59514-023-9$16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Kia, seventeen, seeks escape from her mother's cancer, her emotionally distant father, and her own inability to stop her self-destructive cutting. She plays along with the Wiccan experimentation of her two best friends, but what truly inspires her is the vampire-themed goth subculture of New York City. Kia can relate to the connection between blood, life, and release that is embraced at the vampire meetings, plus the DJ at the club events is smokin' hot. She is increasingly drawn into late-night private vampire parties and consumed with her attraction to Damon (the DJ), and her life quickly spins out of control as she skips school, misses some of the last possible opportunities to spend time with her mother, and alienates herself from her loyal friends. Ultimately, Kia's wholesale and mistaken belief that Damon and his friends are real vampires culminates in a disturbing scene where Kia hurts herself in a way that demands attention and help, and Damon is revealed to be just another adult with bad judgment and a mundane life. There are occasional slips in logic that cannot be explained away by Kia's misinterpretations, but these are minor problems, and perceptive readers will notice and track Kia's leaps of logic that lead her to her ill-fated conclusion. Similar to Hautman's Sweetblood (BCCB 7/03) in the use of vampirism as an escape from the banalities and cruelties of everyday life (and the presence of a creepy older guy willing to manipulate a naïve teen), this novel taps into the sometimes overwhelming wish to believe in an outside force, even an unsavory one, that can alter the future. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue • Until Tonight: A Memoir • Beautiful Stranger: A Memoir of an Obsession With Perfection • Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers • In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson

Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue • Until Tonight: A Memoir • Beautiful Stranger: A Memoir of an Obsession With Perfection • Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers • In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson

Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis: The Ironic Inferno of British Satire

Gavin Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 328 pp. $35.00; $21.95 paper. In his confessional autobiography Experience, Martin Amis records a quarrel with Salman Rushdie over the quality of Samuel Beckett's prose. It is an especially revealing instance of Amis's taste for categorical judgments and confrontation, of what he calls the Amis "mouth" and its "bad habits." "[I]t drinks," he complains, "and it smokes and it swears." Most importantly, he laments, it "talks too much."1 His inability to comprehend Beckett's style, like his father's blankness in response to modernism and narrative experimentalism, is a warning to critics who see Amis as a postmodernist writer. In the tense exchange over Beckett's writing, he is invited outside by Rushdie. Amis in a curious footnote observes that the critic Christopher Hitchens responded to the account by wishing that Rushdie had invited him outside as well. Reading Gavin Keulks's Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950 is to be reminded of the fierce reluctance with which British writers approach what Martin Amis calls the postmodernist narrative's "potential for huge boredom."2 The Amises are quarrelsome and contentious, often conducting their disagreements in public. One of the principal motifs of Martin Amis's novels is social and professional rivalry that can spill over [End Page 544] into sexual competition, all of it rhetorically figured in terms of games and conspiracies. (Amis himself enters the fictional world of Money in order to defeat the central character at chess.) Billiards, tennis, darts, chess, even pub video games create a fabric of envy, plotting, and conspiratorial activities that border on the feral and the lethal. "I write," he exclaims, "about one-upping."3 Who is on top, who deserves to be, and how they will fall are the questions that energize his satire and inform his journalism. The issues are masculinity, capitalism, and the excesses of a media-driven society. Losing, in particular, is a focus of chronic anxiety in Martin Amis's work. The fear of being abandoned, losing one's place, and sleeping rough are an Amis obsession. His characters from Gregory Riding to Richard Tull fear the street, brood over the loss of family and social position (yet paradoxically court it). The essential question of Amis's satire is what happens to Narcissus when the pool dries up. The answer, while always comic, tends to verge on something akin to despair. Gavin Keulks's admirable but limited study attempts to focus on the Kingsley-Martin father-son relationship and its immediate milieu in order to illuminate their "antithetical literary relationship" and their "centrality" in "mid- and late-century debates over the future of English fiction in both its realistic and postmodern forms" (5). I am not at all persuaded by Keulks's high estimation of Kingsley Amis's novels, but together the Amises' work does illuminate (in sharply curtailed ways) some of the issues Keulks addresses. While Keulks overstates the importance of "the psychodynamics of literary inheritance" (6), he also does not explore the psychological origins and ramifications of this deeply adversarial relationship in sufficient depth. Keulks's approach is textual: he juxtaposes a novel by Kingsley, for example Lucky Jim, with a comparable text by Martin, The Rachel Papers. The result is often interesting but not quite as illuminating as Keulks believes. He observes that Kingsley was "an aloof, sometimes distant father" (118). Martin, in an interview with Charles Michener, confessed that Kingsley "had always been sort of remote, always in his study basically" (qtd. in Keulks [End Page 545] 282). But Christopher Hitchens once claimed that Martin and Kingsley had "the most enviable father-son relationship I'd even seen" (qtd. in Diedrick 145). What is Keulks to do? His book is not a biography...

On Being Mentored: A Tribute to Henri Nouwen

This article is a first-person account of the author’s experience of being mentored by the late Henri Nouwen, an inspiring priest and professor. The article describes the ongoing positive impact of that relationship upon the author’s growth and development during his college years and early adulthood. The author argues that compassionate and inspiring mentors are of critical value to young men in today’s world, particularly for individuals raised with distant, absent, or ineffective fathers. Key aspects of the mentoring process are deconstructed and delineated.

Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Bragg, Rick. Ava's Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 304 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $25.00. Rick Bragg (b. 1959) has carved out a journalism career for himself writing features mostly about people who share his working class origins. He started with papers in his native Alabama, and now he is a national correspondent for The New York Times and has a Pulitzer to his credit for his reporting on the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. In 1997 he told the story of his mother in the book, All Over But the Shouting. It drew rave reviews—Pat Conroy called it "one of the best books I've ever read"—and was a best seller. His collection of personal profiles, published first in papers, called Somebody Told Me (2000), was equally well received. Ava's Man has already drawn the unique kind of praise his previous efforts saw. The book takes this title because the author knew the widow of the subject of this biography but not the subject, Charlie Bundrum, his maternal grandfather, who died in 1958, a year before the author was born. Bundrum lived in the foothills of the Appalachians, near the Alabama-Georgia border, and worked primarily as a roofer, but also as a carpenter, a moonshiner and a fisherman. Bragg presents Bundrum completely, without glossing over his rough edges—the kind that brought him to knock his grown son unconscious with a single punch to the face. "In this pungent paean to his grandfather, Bragg also chronicles a vanished South that, like the once-wild Coosa River Charlie liked to ply in homemade boats, is becoming too tamed to accommodate those who would carve out a proud if hardscrabble living on its margins."—Publishers Weekly. "In creating an indelible portrait of his grandfather, Bragg also brings alive a particular time and place showing us just how much we've lost as we've made progress."—Booklist. Harvey, Steven. Boundfor Shady Grove. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. 157 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.95. This is an eclectic collection of essays about traditional mountain music. It includes, for example, a piece that describes in detail the creation of a handmade banjo, another on a trip to England to explore the origins of this music, one on a pawn shop that specializes in musical instruments and firearms, and another on a banjo contest. 98 The author was born in 1949, in Dodge City, Kansas, and received his doctorate from the University of Virginia. He has been an English professor at Young Harris College in North Georgia since 1976. This is his fourth essay collection in book form, following a volume of poetry. Hickam, Homer. Sky of Stone: A Memoir. New York: Delacorte Press/Random House, 2001. 336 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $24.95. This is the third and final book in a trilogy of memoirs from a NASA engineer who grew up in a West Virginia coal camp. The first, Rocket Boys, was a number one New York Times bestseller, later made into the successful Hollywood movie, October Sky. This book, Sky of Stone, takes place in the Summer of 1961 when the author has returned home after his first year at Virginia Tech. "Sonny" as the author calls himself, is working at the coal mine his father runs for a large company. The title comes from how the sky appears when miners first emerge from underground. The plot is enlivened by Sonny's difficult relationship with his distant father, the impending break-up of his parents' marriage, an older woman who becomes a love interest and an investigation of Sonny's father's complicity in a methane explosion that killed a friend. "This concluding volume has the feel of literary durability about it, even more than the muchballyhooed Rocket Boys."—Kirkus Reviews. Homer Hickam (b. 1943) was born in Coalwood, West Virginia, received a BS from VPI, served in Vietnam as Second Lieutenant, and then worked for the Army Missile Command and NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, until his recent retirement. Kelsay, Michael. Too Close to Call. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. 274 pages. Hardback...

Family Systems Theory, Attachment Theory, and Culture*

Family systems theory and attachment theory have important similarities and complementarities. Here we consider two areas in which the theories converge: (a) in family system theorists' description of an overly close, or "enmeshed," mother-child dyad, which attachment theorists conceptualize as the interaction of children's ambivalent attachment and mothers' preoccupied attachment; (b) in family system theorists' description of the "pursuer-distance cycle" of marital conflict, which attachment theorists conceptualize as the interaction of preoccupied and dismissive partners. We briefly review family systems theory evidence, and more extensively review attachment theory evidence, pertaining to these points of convergence. We also review cross-cultural research, which leads us to conclude that the dynamics described in both theories reflect, in part, Western ways of thinking and Western patterns of relatedness. Evidence from Japan suggests that extremely close ties between mother and child are perceived as adaptive, and are more common, and that children experience less adverse effects from such relationships than do children in the West. Moreover, in Japan there is less emphasis on the importance of the exclusive spousal relationship, and less need for the mother and father to find time alone to rekindle romantic, intimate feelings and to resolve conflicts by openly communicating their differences. Thus, the "maladaptive" pattern frequently cited by Western theorists of an extremely close mother-child relationship, an unromantic, conflictual marriage characterized by little verbal communication and a peripheral, distant father, may function very differently in other cultures. While we believe that both theories will be greatly enriched by their integration, we caution against the application of either theory outside the cultures in which they were developed.

Mama's Boys

In this narrative, the author compares identical twin brothers—one gay, one straight—to the character Jaromil in Milan Kundera's novel Life Is Elsewhere. He describes in some detail various rebellious experiments that one brother conducted and the way in which mother, Jaynet, managed the two brothers. The essay examines, implicitly, the notion that gay men come from families with a distant father and a strong mother. It is, coincidentally, also a critique of American upper middle-class liberalism, in the same sense as that Betty Freidan advanced in The Feminine Mystique. The methodological assumptions behind this essay agree with what sociologist Richard Sennett proposed in his book Authority, in which he asserted, boldly and perhaps heretically, that when a sociological study can capture the inner life of the individual under historical and psychological stress with the authenticity of a good novel, then the science of sociology might have a valid raison d'être.

Dearest Wilding: a memoir: with love letters from Theodore Dreiser

A candid and intimate chapter in the life of a modern woman, Yvette Eastman's vivid narrative also contributes richly to the life story of Theodore Dreiser. Dearest Wilding: A Memoir records the journey that took Yvette Szekely from an upper-middle-class scholar's home in Budapest to the intellectual and artistic centers of urban America in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 sixteen-year-old Yvette Szekely met Dreiser, who was fifty-eight at the time, and within a year he became her lover. Dreiser remained central to her life--as lover, father figure, and mentor--until his death in 1945. Her portrait of Dreiser, who is by no means idealized, is of a complex man--often troubled, suspicious, and jealous, but also caring and supportive. The book is much more than an account of a sixteen-year relationship, however. It describes Eastman's attempt to understand her bond with Dreiser, forcing her back to her childhood, to memories of her distinguished but distant father who remained in Hungary, and to the early experiences that made the aging Dreiser so important to her life. In an afterword, the author thoughtfully reflects on the patterns of love and loss that form part of her past. Dearest Wilding is a valuable primary source in literary history and among the last documents from this era. One of the most important figures in the memoir is Max Eastman, whose early relationship with Yvette Szekely resulted in marriage years later. As perhaps the last reminiscence of Dreiser and his circle that will ever appear, Dearest Wilding: A Memoir promises rewarding reading.