Families As We Are a book by Perdita Huston

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Perdita Huston's FAMILIES AS WE ARE (2001), published by The Feminist Press of the City University of New York, is an astonishing book likely to change government policy and ideas about support for families everywhere. Huston is a feminist former government administrator (Peace Corps Regional Director for North Africa, the Near East, Asia, the Pacific, and Peace Corp chief in both Mali and Bulgaria) whose writing is a pleasure to read.... interesting, compelling, literary, easy to read, and substantial.

She takes her reader on an armchair round the world tour of visits to representative families in Japan, Thailand, Bangladesh, China, Mali, Uganda, Egypt, Jordan, Brazil, El Salvador, and the USA. Her in depth interviews make the important point that families around the world are alive and well, and surviving in new and different, often imaginative ways sometimes controversial, but destined to be accepted in time by people who may now question the need for change and new solutions to problems of family survival. Government action and policy changes are needed to support family survival efforts Huston describes, and she makes a good case for looking at old, classical problems in new ways.

Former U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard C. Holbrooke, author of TO END A WAR, offers a touching Foreward to Perdita Huston's book, and states "she is, in her way, still the scribe of Constantinois, writing down the words and thoughts of the voiceless, helping give them shape and, above all, giving them to us." Ambassador Holbrooke clearly admires Perdita Huston, and anyone who reads her wonderful book can quickly understand why.

Huston's book is a curious and wonderful combination of hard, politically shocking facts and quiet, humane reflection and communication about delicate and often undiscussed and unrevealed important needs human beings have around the world, needs not confined to particular regions or countries of the world. Problems Perdita Huston reveals in FAMILIES AS WE ARE (2001) are truly universal. They exist worldwide, far away and also in our own back yards. They are not to be run away from. They are to be faced carefully and intelligently.

Perdita Huston is a new kind of feminist. Her communications style is refreshingly diplomatic and careful. It calls for solutions to problems without scapegoats or bromides. Implicitly, Huston invites non-Feminist females and sympathetic males to join Feminists concerned about the very subject of families, their survival, and resources they need. FAMILIES AS WE ARE (2001) sets a new standard in Feminist communications and polemics, and is bound to make friends for Feminism and its goals worldwide. Hopefully, other Feminists will notice her new style, and give us more of the same.

Perdita Huston provides us with important information about an important subject not to be ignored or trivialized....the survival of the family as an institution. Her words are bound to bring tears to the eyes of readers, and to make them call for government action and change as it concerns the subject of the family.

All this said, FAMILIES AS WE ARE (2001) is a hopeful and optimistic book, truly memorable and likely to become a classic read and re-read by thoughtful people for decades to come. We owe a lot to Perdita Huston for writing it.

David Roger Allen, from Amazon.com

Perdita Huston writes about what she is most interested in - people. A quintessential listener and superb raconteur, she enables her readers to see women, men, children and families as for the first time. We savor her eye for detail about their daily lives, her wonderment at their tenacity to survive under a variety of conditions, their boundless energy to create, derive joy and find humor even in dire circumstances, and soar to admirable heights of compassion and sacrifice. What Perdita has done in is make tangible the universality of the human condition. She writes with a unique faith in the ties that bind us and an inspiring optimism that these ties will indeed move us toward a better world. Her latest book offers a laboratory of cases, issues, and reflections -- ideal for discussion in high school and college classrooms and book clubs.

Reader Commentary, from Amazon.com

Globalization has affected more than the economies of nations of the world; it has also changed cultural and social norms. Huston spent three years traveling in 11 countries to chronicle multigenerations of families and how they have been affected by those cultural and social changes. She recorded elders lamenting the fast-paced lives of the younger generations, lives filled with more material things--even in the most economically depressed nations--but devoid of the cohesion of earlier family life. She recorded the feelings of alienation and vulnerability of younger generations. She explores how contraception and broader legal rights for women have affected their roles as well as those of men. Huston talked to families in Japan, Thailand, Bangladesh, China, Mali, Uganda, Egypt, Jordan, Brazil, El Salvador, and the U.S. She recorded how individuals are coping with changes in concepts of human rights and with economic transformations brought about by increased technology. Among her conclusions: "Throughout human experience, families have met the challenge of change. Indeed, there are two constants: change and family."