TOWNSEND, Nicholas W., THE PACKAGE DEAL; Marriage. Work and Fatherhood in Men's Lives. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002, 264 pp., $19.95 softcover and $64.50 hardcover.Contemporary North American culture, like post-industrial cultures elsewhere, imbues its members with time honoured beliefs and cultural meanings while simultaneously requiring cultural and vocational leaps of faith into uncharted territory. Social and technological changes are measured in years rather than decades, denying a sense of perspective before more leaping is required. Focusing on men's lives, Nickolas Townsend explores how men go about making life course decisions. The Package Deal, in Townsend's words: [is] ...directed at understanding a framework of cultural meanings through which men make sense of their actions, circumstances, and relationships as sons, husbands, and fathers. A social anthropologist by training, Townsend's perspective is informed by the work of the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, with his emphasis on contradictory and conflicting goals, methods and differential access to resources.*For Townsend's Northern California working and middle class men, change has often rendered obscure already ambiguous cultural clues, symbols and influences as to how they should pursue life choices. Coming of age in the early 1970s, their childhood and adolescent years witnessed the transformation of previously semi-rural, agricultural towns turned postwar baby boom communities, into a decentralized urban centre built on Cold War defence spending. As Townsend found, the more recent intrusion of Silicon Valley and its new high tech industries promises further transformation. Townsend, English by birth and early education, spent 12 years in the environs of Meadowview, the pseudonym of this community, and provides readers with a creditable sense of place.Relying on in-depth interviews and his own observations, Townsend stakes out the relationship between marriage, work, home ownership, and fatherhood as the focus of his study. If the first three areas are of interest in themselves, it is the perspective of men's lives and fatherhood that ties them all together. Sitting in their living rooms and in other venues, these men, sometimes with spouses present, are asked to compare their original life plans (even ones never consciously articulated) against their present lives, as well as to reflect on the relationships that bind them to others. Readers are reminded that there are often his and lier marriages - and compromises that make a single union. …