Howard and Kathleen Bahr have given us new and exciting ways to think about critically important but often neglected issues in the family. With an intellectual depth and rigor rarely found in the social sciences, they have challenged the ways scholars too often have viewed family relationships. In addition, they have plowed rich new ground in the understudied and underappreciated domains of love, sacrifice, and transcendence. This book is beautifully and carefully written and deserves wide readership by scholars and students in the social and behavioral sciences.

David C. Dollahite, Professor of Family Life, Brigham Young University

An in-depth look at love, sacrifice, transcendence, and commitment as family processes frequently neglected in scholarly literature....Convincing and well developed....Recommended.

Choice Reviews

The Bahrs have produced something remarkable. They argue that our study of humans is losing its humanity-that physics envy in the family sciences frequently blinds us to the meaning of family life, relationships, and work for real folks in the real world. “Mainstream family scholarship is not wrong; it is incomplete,” the Bahrs argue. “We would enlarge the circle of illumination, not reduce it” …and enlarge it they have. Drawing on an expansive range of sources from sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, poetry, history, ethnography, and quantitative and qualitative family studies…the authors offer a heart and soul to family science without removing the head. In the end, this is a book that emphasizes meaning over medians, transcendence over T-tests, and potential over pathology. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students will be challenged and broadened. Faculty may be reminded why they fell in love with family studies in the first place.

Loren Marks, Assistant Professor in the School of Human Ecology, Louisiana State University