LEEDER, Elaine. THE FAMILY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: A GENDERED JOURNEY. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. 305pages, soft cover $43.95.Introductory family textbooks often seem to have been written with the goal of being as much as possible like most other introductory family textbooks. The Leeder book, although it deals with standard topics for introductory family courses, offers a gendered, global perspective that provides much that is fresh, new, and stimulating. It is interesting and teachable and opens up many valuable pedagogical possibilities.The book is rich in discussions of gender intersecting with family. One can read in it about patriarchy, violence against women, gender selective abortion and infanticide, gender differences in domestic workload, gender differences in pay, women as victims in war, rape, gender in old age, gender and sibling relationships, and much more. The book advocates a critical consciousness and provides basic ideas of standpoint theory, feminist theory, and conflict theory in order to illuminate gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other diversity issues in relationship to families.The book offers much information about global diversity in family experience. It is a great strength of the book that students can read about divorce, adolescence, domestic violence, intergenerational relationships, weddings, marriage, parenting, and many other issues in the context of other cultures and countries. The book provides a healthy sense of how diverse humankind is and yet also how there is a core that humankind has in common. Also, the book provides an excellent explanation of cultural relativism, so readers are helped to appreciate global differences in families in the context of global differences in meanings and morality.Another strength of the book is that it explores the powerful forces for globalization that impact families everywhere. This is an introductory family textbook that explores how international corporations, global capitalism, power differentials within societies, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and global changes in trade regulations have an enormous impact on families around the world. As part of this, Leeder develops and applies Wallerstein's global systems theory, showing how for several centuries, through warfare, colonization, imposed trade systems, the application of economic power differentials, and post-colonial institutions and alliances, the world is organized to benefit the richest nations and what this means for families. …