Authors: John R. Hall, Elizabeth Stone
ISBN-13: 9780765805881, ISBN-10: 076580588X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Date Published: May 2004
Edition: 1st Edition
Family stories have a secret power: they play a unique role in shaping our identity, our sense of our place in the world. The give us values, inspirations, warnings, incentives. We need them. We use them. We keep them. They reverberate throughout our lives, affecting our choices in love, work, friendship, and lifestyle. Elizabeth Stone, whose grandparents came from Italy to Brooklyn, artfully weaves her own family stories among the stories of more than a hundred people of all backgrounds, ages, and regionsclarifying for us predictable types of family legends, providing ways to interpret our own stories and their roles in our lives. She examines stories of birth, death, work, money, romantic adventureall in the context of the family storytelling ritual. And she shows how stories about our most ancient ancestors may provide answers at milestone moments in our lives, as well as how stories about our newest family members carve out places for them so they will fit into their families, comfortably or otherwise.
Transaction introduction | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Introduction | 3 | |
Ch. 1 | Family ground rules | 15 |
Ch. 2 | Family definitions | 32 |
Ch. 3 | Family monuments | 48 |
Ch. 4 | Underground rules | 75 |
Ch. 5 | Family myths | 96 |
Ch. 6 | The pecking order and how to survive it | 111 |
Ch. 7 | Of money, self-worth, and lost fortunes | 146 |
Ch. 8 | Legacies | 165 |
Ch. 9 | Fairy godmothers and patron saints | 196 |
Ch. 10 | In pursuit of freedom | 220 |
Notes | 245 |