John R. Gillis

Our whole society may be obsessed with "family values," but, as historian John Gillis points out in this entertaining and eye-opening narrative, most of our images of "home sweet home" are of very recent vintage. In fact, our most cherished family rituals (Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine's Day, white weddings, reunions, Father's Day, and Mother's Day) didn't even exist until the Victorian era. A World of Their Own Making questions our idealized notion of "The Family," a mind-set in which myth and symbol still hold sway. As the families we live with become more fragile, the symbolic families we live by become more powerful. Yet it is only by accepting the notion that our rituals, myths, and images must be open to perpetual revision that we can satisfy our human needs and changing circumstances. Our families are worlds of our own making. By using the past to throw light on the present, Gillis empowers us to enjoy and accept responsibility for our own creations.

Since before recorded history, people have congregated near water. But as growing populations around the globe continue to flow toward the coasts on an unprecedented scale and climate change raises water levels, our relationship to the sea has begun to take on new and potentially catastrophic dimensions. The latest generation of coastal dwellers lives largely in ignorance of the history of those who came before them, the natural environment, and the need to live sustainably on the world's shores. Humanity has forgotten how to live with the oceans. In The Human Shore, a magisterial account of 100,000 years of seaside civilization, John R. Gillis recovers the coastal experience from its origins among the people who dwelled along the African shore to the bustle and glitz of today's megacities and beach resorts. He takes readers from discussion of the possible coastal location of the Garden of Eden to the ancient communities that have existed along beaches, bays, and bayous since the beginning of human society to the crucial role played by coasts during the age of discovery and empire. An account of the mass movement of whole populations to the coasts in the last half-century brings the story of coastal life into the present. Along the way, Gillis addresses humankind's changing relationship to the sea from an environmental perspective, laying out the history of the making and remaking of coastal landscapes -- the creation of ports, the draining of wetlands, the introduction and extinction of marine animals, and the invention of the beach -- while giving us a global understanding of our relationship to the water. Learned and deeply personal, The Human Shore is more than a history : it is the story of a space that has been central to the attitudes, plans, and existence of those who live and dream at land's end.

Broughton House, an old English country estate set along the Wiltshire/Dorset border in England, is the inanimate protagonist of Penny Jordan's lengthy exploration into the human drama. Three couples view the house as the answer to their personal problems. Eleanor, with her new husband, two sons from a previous marriage and troubled teenaged stepdaughter, hopes the house will help them bond as a family. Hotel manager Zoe, who dreams of turning Broughton House into a bed-and-breakfast in order to her lover, Ben, from the demands of his dysfunctional family. Finally, there is Fern, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage to Nick. She's hopelessly in love with Nick's stepbrother Adam, with whom she once had an affair and who is now involved in the sale of Broughton House. Fern is the most interesting of the lot as she comes to realize that she is a battered wife - sans the bruises - and slowly emerges as a self-possessed woman.