The Family Thing.

The article presents information on the book "Embattled Paradise. The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty," by Arlene Skolnick. Skolnick's book, a wide-ranging and in the postwar years, is a useful antidote to the bleak rhetoric of loss and decline. Skolnick, a family scholar, attempts to move the family history debate away from jeremiads and moralistic denunciations. In a climate of Cultural dislocation, it has been easy enough for many critics to fasten on certain aspects of the changing family as symptoms of decay. But Skolnick argues, such moralizing is and misleading.