The End of Men: And the Rise of Women Hanna Rosin Riverhead Books, 2012; 320 pages, $27.95 Despite the title of Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men is clearly written from the standpoint of women. Men as a sex are languishing: they do not complete college, are not working full-time jobs, and, with the […]
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Baby-Making: What the New Reproductive Treatments Mean for Families and Society Bart Fauser and Paul Devroey Oxford University Press, 2011; 292 pages, $29.95 What does it mean to “make” a child? The title of this book is presumably a nod to the euphemistic meaning of the term, but with the twist that it invokes the […]
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Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution Mary Eberstadt Ignatius Press, 2012; 171 pages, $19.95 As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s mandate requiring all health-insurance plans to cover contraception “free of charge” to women took effect August 1 of this year, Mary Eberstadt’s collection of essays Adam and Eve […]
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Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873–1973 Allan Carlson Transaction Publishers, 2012; 170 pages, $29.95 These days, the only time mainline Protestant denominations warrant headlines is when they talk about sex and marriage. Meeting this past summer in Indianapolis, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church attracted attention from journalists and editors when its […]
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How Civilizations Die: And Why Islam Is Dying Too David P. Goldman Regnery, 2011; 331 pages, $27.95 As one who appreciates the link between the family and the economy, David P. Goldman is one of our better economists. Yet because he is the sort of writer who likes to formulate Universal Laws of History, his […]
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The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism Jeffrey Bell Encounter Books, 2012; 322 pages, $25.95 For the past twenty years, the conventional wisdom espoused in Republican circles, by establishment types and by many who consider themselves conservative, is that candidates who want to win elections should avoid getting sidetracked into “divisive” social […]
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The Neoconservative Persuasion, Selected Essays, 1942–2009 By Irving Kristol; edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb Basic Books, 2011; 390 pages, $29.95 There aren’t very many neoconservatives anymore. It’s a label that serves no purpose except to identify evil-doing and evil-thinking. So now’s the time to assess the achievements and the failures of what we must say, at […]
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From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation Mitch Pearlstein Rowman & Littlefield, 2011; 165 pages, $50.00 On January 12, 2012, CNN News ran a headline, “Forced To Wear Sign: Dynesha Lax ‘I Lie, I Steal, I Sell Drugs.’”The story leads off: The mother of a troubled 14-year-old […]
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Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought Scott Yenor Baylor University Press, 2011; 430 pages, $39.95 Scott Yenor wastes no time in getting to the point. The political science professor at Boise State University writes in the opening chapter of this book: “Modern individuals see themselves as persons independent of unchosen duties […]
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Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 Charles Murray Crown Forum, 2012; 407 pages, $27 Members of the notorious Baby Boom generation, including many like this reviewer who were born in the 1950s and reached adolescence in the 1960s, know from personal experience that the America they are passing on to their twenty-something children […]
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