Overview
At its heart, this book is a collection of personal accounts that speak to a variety of social concerns, from youth crime and domestic violence to public education and health care. Told by children as well as adults, these stories offer illuminating if sometimes disturbing testimony about the circumstances of life in the contemporary United States. One story, for example, depicts the precarious world of a thirteen-year-old drug dealer. Another presents the searing narrative of a woman convicted of killing her abusive husband. Still another tells the painful saga of an "atomic" war veteran fighting the ravages of a disease induced and then denied by his own government.If the stories gathered by Thomas J. Cottle seem removed from the experience of some Americans, his telling of them often blurs the line between the extraordinary and the ordinary. As he explains in his introduction, the rules and rituals, institutions and conventions that define our social life link us in a fragile web of interdependence, what Cottle calls "the ecology of peril." Viewed in this light, the lives we lead are all in some sense "at risk," ever vulnerable to the harsh vicissitudes of inequity and injustice.
Cottle organizes his narratives into four sections—on the perils of health, family, school, and society at large. He concludes with an afterword that addresses some of the methodological issues raised by his approach. A blend of subjective insight and objective assessment, art and science, this book represents a vision of sociology as Cottle has practiced and refined it for more than thirty years. Alternately described as "story sociology" or "life study research," its aim is to recover the personal, human dimension so often overlooked in the scientific study of society.
About the Author:
Thomas J. Cottle is professor of education at Boston University. A clinical psychologist as well as a sociologist, he is the author of more than twenty-five books.
Synopsis
At its heart, this book is a collection of personal accounts that speak to a variety of social concerns, from youth crime and domestic violence to public education and health care. Told by children as well as adults, these stories offer illuminating if sometimes disturbing testimony about the circumstances of life in the contemporary United States. One story, for example, depicts the precarious world of a thirteen-year-old drug dealer. Another presents the searing narrative of a woman convicted of killing her abusive husband. Still another tells the painful saga of an "atomic" war veteran fighting the ravages of a disease induced and then denied by his own government.
If the stories gathered by Thomas J. Cottle seem removed from the experience of some Americans, his telling of them often blurs the line between the extraordinary and the ordinary. As he explains in his introduction, the rules and rituals, institutions and conventions that define our social life link us in a fragile web of interdependence, what Cottle calls "the ecology of peril." Viewed in this light, the lives we lead are all in some sense "at risk," ever vulnerable to the harsh vicissitudes of inequity and injustice.
Cottle organizes his narratives into four sections—on the perils of health, family, school, and society at large. He concludes with an afterword that addresses some of the methodological issues raised by his approach. A blend of subjective insight and objective assessment, art and science, this book represents a vision of sociology as Cottle has practiced and refined it for more than thirty years. Alternately described as "story sociology" or "life study research," its aim is to recover the personal, human dimension so often overlooked in the scientific study of society.
About the Author:
Thomas J. Cottle is professor of education at Boston University. A clinical psychologist as well as a sociologist, he is the author of more than twenty-five books.
Publishers Weekly
A gifted social scientist and professor of education at Boston University, Cottle has published numerous other books (Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment) that also combine his objectivity as a sociologist and clinical psychologist with subjective anecdotes of people in crisis. Collected here are true stories of men, women and children living on society's fringe the poor, the drug addicted, the abused as told in their own words during interviews with the author. As a context for the difficulties his subjects have faced, Cottle has divided their accounts into injustices caused by failures within the family, the school, the health-care system and society at large. Reminiscent of the work of Robert Coles and Jonathan Kozol, these stories are immediate and compelling. Unforgettable is the narrative of Esther Crighton, who has advanced cancer and who refuses to apologize for the fact that her material comfort comes from her 13-year-old son selling drugs ("Cocaine, I hate that word. But every day I take what it brings me. It's the way me and my son get on the train"). A particularly heartwrenching story is told by 53-year-old Ina Merman, who describes how she and her husband, who have raised children and worked hard all their lives, can no longer afford medical care or adequate nourishment ("Do we eat like kings and queens? You want the truth? I'm embarrassed by what I put on the table sometimes"). Woven throughout these stories are Cottle's sensitive comments about the interconnectivity and interdependency of all Americans. In some ways, he maintains, we are all at risk if we allow increasing numbers of children to grow up in poverty and more and more people to fall through the cracks. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.