Blackberry winter My earlier years
Margaret Mead
- New York, NY Morrow, 1972.
- 351 pages: black and white photographs; 22 cm.
Includes index. Includes family tree.
2. Home and travel -- 3. The original punk -- 4. My father and academia -- 5. On being a granddaughter -- 6. The pattern my family made for me -- 7. In and out of school -- 8. College: DePauw -- 9. College: Barnard -- 10. Student marriage and graduate school. 1. Prologue: for whom and why -- PART ONE 11. Samoa: the adolescent girl -- 12. Return from the field -- 13. Manus: the thought of primitive children -- 14. The years between field trips -- 15. Arapeth and Mandugumor: sex roles in culture -- 16. Tchambuli: sex and temperament -- 17. Ball and Istmul: a quantum leap. PART TWO 18. On having a baby -- 19. Catherine, born in wartime -- 20 -- On being a grandmother -- 21. Epilogue: gathered threads. PART THREE
"After spending about 50 years studying other peoples' cultures and family lives, Dr. Mead describes in great detail in her book her own childhood in a large, close, intellectual family in Pennsylvania and also her later years as a mother— had been told she could not have children, but eventually had a daughter at the age of 38— and grandmother. She said the book was written out of her passionate belief that what society lacks today is the mutually beneficial closeness between grandchildren and grandparents. 'People kept saying to me, ‘How can you understand kids so well?’ and I said, ‘If I can understand Stone Age savages, I can certainly understand kids in our society’,' said Dr. Mead, who is 70 years old. She attributed her own ease with other genera tions to her relationship with her paternal grandmother, 'the most decisive influence in my life.' ... Dr. Mead's memoirs touch on her three marriages, all of Which were to anthropologists and ended in divorce; several of her field trips to the South Pacific, and her life as a parent and grandparent. She says that one of the questions she is most often asked is what she would choose to do if she had her life to live over again." - New York Times Book Review, September 19. 1972