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Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.
The Prime of Life puts today’s challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.
Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood’s joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood’s realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.
- Sales Rank: #239758 in Books
- Published on: 2015-04-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.40" h x 1.30" w x 6.30" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 432 pages
Review
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can’t afford to leave home and can’t get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature. Both sides of the generational divide should take comfort from this timely, thoughtful work by Steven Mintz…Mintz argues for a new understanding of adulthood…It is a great book, and a triumph of historical writing; it shows that the past really can explain the present. (Jane Ridley The Spectator 2015-05-02)
[Mintz] offers some comforting news. Going back centuries in this country, ‘adults’ never particularly had their acts together… [He shows] that the 1950s model of family life, with its emphasis on early marriage and childbearing as markers of adulthood, is anything but representative of traditional values… His message―that there are many ways to wear the mantle of responsible adulthood and that the 1950s model is a mere blip on history’s radar―is deeply necessary and long overdue. (Meghan Daum New York Times Book Review 2015-06-21)
Mintz uses history to illustrate both the similarities and differences between adulthood in 2015 and adulthood in other times, so that readers can put their lives into perspective…Mintz is a good storyteller and his examples, particularly from centuries past are engaging. Ultimately, Mintz provides a very readable, and very interesting, history of an all too often overlooked subject. (Catherine Ramsdell PopMatters 2015-05-26)
This original and comprehensive book interestingly sets the far-reaching change in contemporary adulthood in historical perspective. (E. Stina Lyon Times Higher Education 2015-04-30)
Coming of age, argues historian Steven Mintz, is not what it used to be. Characterizing adulthood as a ‘historical black hole,’ Mintz sets out to trace the concept’s trajectory from the nineteenth century to its 1950s apex, and its disintegration in our individualistic times. He looks at shifts in intimacy, marriage, parenthood and work, noting that some 80% of today’s U.S. citizens in their late twenties have yet to tick off all the traditional indicators of adulthood, such as leaving home. Yet we need to dig deeper to redefine adulthood, he avers―not least, by reinstating qualities such as judgement to the definition. (Barbara Kiser Nature 2015-04-16)
Describing the cultural, economic, and social changes from the Colonial era to today’s world with a wealth of information and attention to class, gender, and ethnicity, Mintz argues that neither religious nor secular middle-class values are adequate responses to the new generation’s problems. (N. Zmora Choice 2015-09-01)
A thoughtful and strangely encouraging tour of an often difficult life stage. (Kirkus Reviews 2015-02-01)
Historian Mintz approaches a big subject--American adulthood--in a big way; by drawing on 400 years of social and economic history, philosophy, psychology, law, religion, literature, art, and even cinema and television…He presents a thoughtful and thorough guide through the life stages for all readers wishing to embark on these big voyages. (Janet Ingraham Dwyer Library Journal 2015-04-01)
In the 1950s, most men had met all of society’s markers for adulthood by their mid-20s―and most women would never fully meet them, whatever their age. In this engagingly written and thought-provoking book, Mintz explores the fascinating history of American definitions of adulthood and shows how new economic, cultural, and gender relationships have expanded and complicated those definitions in recent years. (Stephanie Coontz, author of A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s)
The Prime of Life is a compelling story of just how much the meaning and process of attaining adulthood has changed throughout the history of the United States. Mintz does a masterful job of narration and interpretation, reminding readers why he is the preeminent historian of the life course. (Frank F. Furstenberg, author of Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teenage Childbearing)
About the Author
Steven Mintz is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
great first few chapters though
By Evan J.
Started out strong and then kinda just kept going on...great first few chapters though!
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Finally, the Truth About Adulthood
By Suzy Tee
The book may not be a page-turner, about which some people seem to be complaining, but its premise couldn't be more profound: "Adulthood" is not a fixed definition by which to judge ourselves, but an ever-changing, highly diverse set of life experiences that varies from person to person, culture to culture, and century to century. To judge any adult life by today's conservative definition of "marriage, family and work" is both damaging and extremely limiting, an observation which Mintz's facts make abundantly clear. More importantly, to use this narrow-minded definition as "...a yardstick by which all trends and social movements are measured [suggests] not just an unhealthy romanticizing of that era but a collective aversion to cultural complexity - one that affects everything from national policy to individual self-esteem." These are not my words, but Meghan Daum's, in her review of the book in the New York Times. I couldn't have said it better myself.
10 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Chronicling Four Hundred Years of American Family Life
By Dr. Laurence Raw
THE PRIME OF LIFE covers an ambitious canvas, as it tries to tell the story of the socially-produced concept of adulthood from the seventeenth century to the present. Through a series of elegantly researched chapters, Mintz focuses on different aspects of the topic, including adolescence, young adulthood, marriage, alternatives to marriage, family life, different constructions of family, and the ways in which human beings have coped with the wok/leisure divide.
And yet the book remains something of a disappointment. Perhaps this is due to the familiarity of the subject-matter: many of the topics covered in THE PRIME OF LIFE have been covered by authors past and present in a form of discourse far more lively than Mintz's rather pedestrian prose. Sometimes it feels as if he has sacrificed originality for comprehensiveness; by trying to cover four hundred years of family life in three hundred pages, he summons up a wealth of evidence but remains short on analysis.
Perhaps the disappointment is also due to a certain degree of cross-cultural myopia. Although specifically focused on American family life, Mintz could have made more comparisons with other countries - not just Great Britain, but other European and Asian nations as well. Sometimes his claims to uniqueness about American family life seem rather hollow; many of the elements he identifies are common to families worldwide.
Or maybe it's just because of the conclusion - after three hundred pages of closely-worded argument, he advises those in late maturity to set aside their problems and look instead at the positive sides of their lives; their ability to make sense of the world through experience, and their feeling that they have achieved something. This advice seems banal, to say the least; many adults have neither the time nor the opportunity to make such reflections, as they struggle to survive in economically stringent times. Even if we do have the capacity to reflect, perhaps we should be looking for new possibilties; in other words, rediscovering our childlike capacity for wonder, rather than trusting in our experience.
THE PRIME OF LIFE is a good dipping-book but rather a tiresome read as a whole.
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