Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition - Softcover

Bateson, Mary Cather

3.85

34 ratings by Goodreads

9780345423573: Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345423577 ISBN 13: 9780345423573

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2001

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In Full Circles, Overlapping Lives, cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson gives us a new way of looking at ourselves, our families, our communities-indeed at the very concept of identity in a changing world. Writing with the clarity and gentleness that touched the many readers of her bestselling book Composing a Life, Bateson opens our eyes here to the meaning of life in a culture at the crossroads.

Bateson begins with a premise at once startling and deeply resonant: we live with strangers-and with strangeness-not only in the shifting worlds of our cities and neighborhoods, but within our families and ourselves. Yet as she explores her own life and the lives of her remarkable students, an even more profound insight emerges: strangeness and love are not contradictory. Listening across generations, weaving together the shining strands of family narratives, pondering the questions of fidelity and connection, exploration and illness, vision and improvisation, Bateson creates a prism through which we can all glimpse facets of our true selves.

At once intimate and far-reaching, haunting and reassuring, Full Circles, Overlapping Lives reflects the wisdom and the love of an extraordinary lifetime.

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Review:

"Home is the heartland of strangeness," writes anthropologist and English professor Mary Catherine Bateson; there are always parts of others, even our closest intimates, that are utterly unknowable. Full Circles, Overlapping Lives explores such "strangeness" between individual lives by turning not only to her family history (she is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) but to the stories of her own students.

Bateson teaches a class on "women's life histories" at Spelman College, an all-black women's college in Atlanta, and carefully assembles her students from traditional-age undergrads and older women from outside the school who can offer a different generational perspective. Together they investigate questions about their knowledge of the self and of others through reading multicultural histories of women and by writing their own stories. Bateson is at her best when she draws out her students, finding parallels in their stories with her own well-considered anthropological observations. She's less effective when she wanders off into generalizations about how to live that seem overly didactic and sometimes outdated--the suburbs, for instance, are no longer quite the all-white 1950s hideaway she imagines, where those who don't like the "smell of other people's cooking" escape. Readers who want new tools for thinking about learning, as well as those who loved Bateson's 1989 bestseller Composing a Life, will nevertheless find much to enjoy. --Maria Dolan

From the Back Cover:

"A wise and beautiful book...Anyone from parent to policy maker who needs to know how human beings tick will be richly renewed by what Bateson has thought through so carefully and presented so elegantly."
Roger Wilkins, Author of A Man's Life

"A stirring journey...With her customary wisdom and subtle wit, Mary Catherine Bateson helps us think about the great divide that we all live with but few discuss: the enormously different life experiences of members of different generations."
Deborah Tannen, Author of You Just Don't Understand

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