Annotation How do working parents provide care and mobilize the help that they need? Karen V. Hansen investigates the lives of working parents and the informal networks they construct to help care for their children. The book concludes with a series of policy suggestions intended to improve the environment in which working families raise children.

APALA Adult Literature Honor Book Shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A TIME Best Book of the Year Set in the months leading up to the 2018 nuclear missile false alarm, a Korean American family living in Hawai'i faces the fallout of their eldest son's attempt to run across the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea in this "fresh, inventive, and at times, hilarious novel" (Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of The Descendants) Things are looking up for Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Their dream of franchising their Korean plate lunch restaurants across Hawaiʻi seems within reach after a visit from Guy Fieri boosts the profile of Cho’s Delicatessen. Their daughter, Grace, is busy finishing her senior year of college and working for her parents, while her older brother, Jacob, just moved to Seoul to teach English. But when a viral video shows Jacob trying—and failing—to cross the Korean demilitarized zone, nothing can protect the family from suspicion and the restaurant from waning sales. No one knows that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his lost grandfather, who feverishly wishes to cross the divide and find the family he left behind in the north. As Jacob is detained by the South Korean government, Mr. and Mrs. Cho fear their son won’t ever be able to return home, and Grace gets more and more stoned as she negotiates her family’s undoing. Struggling with what they don’t know about themselves and one another, the Chos must confront the separations that have endured in their family for decades. Set in the months leading up to the 2018 false missile alert in Hawaiʻi, Joseph Han’s profoundly funny and strikingly beautiful debut novel is an offering that aches with histories inherited and reunions missed, asking how we heal in the face of what we forget and who we remember.

In Family and Civilization, the distinguished Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman demonstrates the close and causal connections between the rise and fall of different types of families and the rise and fall of civilizations, particularly ancient Greece and Rome, medieval and modern Europe, and the United States. Zimmerman traces the evolution of family structure from tribes and clans to extended and large nuclear families to the smaller, often broken families of today. And he shows the consequences of each structure for bearing and rearing of children, for religion, law, and everyday life, and for the fate of civilization itself. Originally published in 1947, this compelling analysis predicted many of today's controversies and trends concerning youth violence and depression, abortion, and homosexuality, the demographic collapse of the West, and the displacement of peoples. This new edition has been edited and abridged by James Kurth of Swarthmore College. It includes essays on the text by Kurth and Bryce Christensen and an introduction by Allan C. Carlson.

From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents, over the course of three decades. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression. Together, their missives – some sardonic, others absurd, others heartbreaking – weave a tapestry of a very modern family trying (and often failing) to show one another they care. The titular “Nuclear Family” includes, among many others: A narcissistic former-child-prodigy father who has taken up haiku writing in his old age and his new wife, a traditional Chinese woman whose attempts to help her stepdaughter find a man include FedExing her silk gowns from Filene’s Basement. Their six-year-old son, Stuart, whose favorite condiment is truffle oil and who wears suits to bed. Julie’s mother, a psychologist who never remarried but may be in love with her arrogant Rabbi and overshares about everything, including the threesome she had with Dutch grad students in 1972.

Attempts to do justice to the complexity of contemporary families and to situate them in their economic, political, and cultural contexts. This book explores the ways in which family life is gendered and reflects on the work of maintaining family and kin relationships, especially as social and family power structures change over time.

"As a child, Ari M. Beser heard stories of his grandfather's dedicated and proud service aboard the two US planes carrying the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. He also heard about a Japanese friend of the family who survived these horrific bombings. Desiring to reconcile these two sides of his family, their history, and their involvement in the war, Beser set out for Japan to meet firsthand with survivors of the atomic devastation. 'The Nuclear Family' tells the story of Ari's grandfathers, the countless Japanese people who suffered and died because of the bombs, and how the use of atomic weapons and nuclear energy continues to affect every single person alive today in ways that we might not understand."--Back cover.

While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. She draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today.