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For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered. E. Mavis Hetherington & John Kelly. New York: Norton. 2002. 307 pp. ISBN 0-393-- 04862-4. $26.95 (cloth).
A trip to my local bookstore revealed an almost dizzying array of books on divorce intended for the lay audience. Unfortunately, few of them are particularly good, most giving advice that can be boiled down to something like "Now that you're divorced, try to get along [for the children's sake]." Another lamentable characteristic of such books is that they tend to rely on almost no empirical data, or are or based on the authors' own "observations or experiences," or, in some cases, are based on the findings of a single study with a small, homogenous sample (e.g., Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000).
For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered is refreshingly different from the average book of this genre. What I find so wonderful about this book is that it synthesizes the wealth of information researchers have collected over the years regarding the impact of divorce and remarriage and communicates this information to the general public in a useful and responsible way. I have often thought that one of the things that we, as researchers...