Examines the relationship of love and money in families and teaches that honesty, a respect for others, and generosity are the most valuable assets in settling family accounts.

The Secret Life of Money leads readers on a fascinating journey to uncover the sources of our monetary desires. By understanding why money has the power to obsess us, we gain the power to end destructive patterns and discover riches of the soul. Midas who can turn all to gold, fishermen who will not share their catch, Dorothy and her companions on the golden road to the Emerald City, Scrooge who cannot give, the hunter who shares not only food but also debt, money that falls from the skies, buried treasures that can be spiritual wealth or be stolen, how debt can be like inheritance, the symbolism of the bulls and bears of Wall Street, the all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill—all these and many other stories and myths from around the world are given delightful retellings and searching analyses in The Secret Life of Money. Chapters include The Many Forms of Money: Understanding Its Symbolic Value; The Almighty Dollar: Why Money Is So Easily Worshipped; Money and Sacrifice: When Money Feels More Important Than Life; Hoarding Money: Why the Life Energy of Misers Is Stolen; The Source of Riches: Gaining a New Understanding of Supply; Inheritance: The Actual andSymbolic Wealth of Our Parents; Indebtedness: How the Debtor’s Tower Connects Earth to Heaven; Changing Symbols: Money, Credit Cards, and Banks; Bulls and Bears: How the Stock Market Reflects the Renewing Cycles of Life.

The authors analyse wealth - total assets and debts rather than income alone - to uncover deep and persistent racial inequality in America, and show how public policies fail to redress this problem.

This long-awaited fourth edition has the same goal as the preceding editions: to understand families in terms of the kinds of interaction through which family life is constructed. The changes in the family as an institution have influenced these processes, just as they have influenced the ways we understand and write about them. But even in these "postmodern" circumstances, an underlying premise of the volume is that two partners establish a family because they have selected each other as distinctively meaningful to one another. They will affirm, modify, elaborate, or retreat from various aspects of the relationship through interaction over time and in changing circumstances. This volume contains the best available interdisciplinary work on the social psychology of the family. More than half of the selections are new to this edition, which incorporates a variety of theoretical and research perspectives that provide the reader with a range of authoritative and up-to-date sources on the family and interpersonal relations. The newer forms of family organization that have emerged in the more recent literature - specifically, single-parent families, stepfamilies, and families of gay and lesbian domestic partners - are included. Authors have been drawn from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, communication, family studies, human development, psychology, anthropology, and social work.

In keeping with a broad conception of interpersonal conflict, this book is organized into two parts. The first focuses on conflict on different types of couple relationships -- homosexual, cross cultural, dating but violent, engaged, and married -- and group relationships -- student peers, parents and their young children, and adult children and their aging parents. The chapters not only review past research on conflict in some relationships, but also take a significant step forward in introducing a variety of other relationship types for future research on conflict. These chapters also offer evidence that conflict is experienced differently in different types of interpersonal relationships. The second part of this book describes basic underlying principles and programs for dealing with interpersonal conflicts. Chapters in this section discuss patterns of argument in everyday life, issues associated with competence in interpersonal conflict, and mediation as a form of intervention for resolution.

The first book to focus on the differences in wealth between women and men, Mariko Lin Chang draws on the most comprehensive national data on wealth and on in-depth interviews to show how differences in earnings, in saving and investing, and, most important, the demands of care-giving all contribute to the gender-wealth gap. A comprehensive portrait of where women and men stand with respect to wealth, Shortchanged not only sheds light on why women lack wealth, but also offers solutions for improving the financial situation of women, men, and families.