Presents information on four basic reunion types with tips on finding the perfect site, menus, geneology, and games, with sample activity programs and timetables

The LYON LEGACY Family means everything…and family depends on love. Join Scott and Nicki as they uncover family secrets, betrayals and deceptions—and fall in love along the way—in this exciting conclusion to THE LYON LEGACY. "Family means everything." Scott Lyon's heard his aunt, Margaret Lyon, utter these words ever since he was a child. But now nobody knows where Margaret is and the family's falling apart. Then Nicolette Bechet—who has reason to hate the Lyons—unexpectedly offers her help. After the way his family treated Nicki, Scott can't believe her offer. He senses there's someone in her own family she's trying to protect. Her grandmother? Old Riva Maynard obviously knows more about the Lyons than she's willing to tell….

In a previous volume, Families as Learning Environments for Children, we presented a series of chapters that dealt with research programs on the role of families as learning environments for children. Those studies were based on empirical data and sought answers to basic research questions, with no explicit concern for the application of the results to practical problems. Rather, their purpose was to contribute primarily to conceptualization, research methodology, and psychological theory. Now, in this volume, we turn our attention to intervention-efforts to modify the way a family develops. As in our previous conference, the participants of the working conference on which the present volume is based are research scientists and scholars interested in application. This group is distinct from practitioners, however, whose primary focus is service; participants in this conference have as their primary interest research into the problems of processes of application. Applied professional issues concerning the lives of families come from many varied sources, from some that are distant and impersonal (e. g. , the law) to direct face-to-face efforts (educators, therapists). The variety of sources and types of applications are eloquent testimony to the degree to which families are subject to a host of societal forces whose implicit or explicit aim is to modify family functioning. For example, some educators may wish to alter family child-rearing patterns to enhance child development; the clinician seeks to help families come to terms and to cope with a schizophrenic child. The list can be extended.

In 'Families' Jane Howard informally visits many dozens of families and tries to discover what makes the best ones work so well. Families are not dying, she finds, although they are evolving in various ways. From the tightest-knit nuclear family or extended clan to the most fragile new commune, the family in one guise or another remains everybody's most basic hold on reality. We may run away from our families as many do, but no sooner do we escape than we find another one, often very much like it. Sympathetically, with immense thrust, she crosses the continent to discover families' myths, jokes, and rituals. She leafs through their scrapbooks, sits on their porches, and takes part, when she can, in their feasts and celebrations. She talks to a father of eighteen, several double first cousins, stepchildren, multiple godmothers, an honorary relative of an Indian tribe, and a nine-year-old boy who has no family but his mother. She sits with a matriarch on the front stoop of a ghetto house, goes camping with a family in Mexico, has Thanksgiving with another in Iowa, and orders pizza with a Greek clan in Massachusetts. Howard reports on visits to conventional Southern and Jewish households and to innovative ones whose members, lacking a common history, plan on building common futures as if water were after all as thick as blood. She examines the notion that "there are ways and ways of achieving kinship, of which birth and marriage are only the most obvious." Millions of clans and families all over the United States continue to celebrate, quarrel, disband, reunite, and endure. Jane Howard makes us realize how our lives are interwoven both with the families we are born into and with those we invent as we go through life. 'Families' is compassionate, provocative, and profound. The paperback edition of this important work will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the study of familial bonds, particularly sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

Lily Kovner could not have dreamed that research for a magazine assignment would resurrect a searing memory from her childhood. A fleeting glimpse of a family treasure looted by the Nazis launches "Afikomen"--Her quest for justice and restitution spanning three continents. Along the way threats, murder and the revelation of a diabolical secret deal thrust Lily onto an emotional rollercoaster further complicated by the thrill of new romance.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.