For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered
Elizabeth A. Vandewater · 2003
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 and academics, do not do very well is give back the information we take from so many people (who kindly donate this information to us) to them in a useful, understandable form. Rather, we tend to share the information among ourselves in the form of highly technical journal articles, book chapters, and trade books-all written in such a way as to be fairly uninteresting to the general reader. Although these forms of publication clearly have their own value, they do little to inform the public about the current state of knowledge on important issues or how the public can apply this knowledge to problems in their own lives. In my view, E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly have done just that, producing a highly readable book that is of interest to researchers, practitioners, and individuals dealing with their own family changes. Researchers interested in the impact of divorce will recognize many of the studies she refers to (although more specific citations throughout would have been nice), and individuals dealing with their own divorce or remarriage will find the Points to Remember sections at the end of each chapter both useful and helpful. Hetherington draws upon the stories of families who participated in the Virginia Longitudinal Study of Divorce over a 20-year period in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories, interwoven with information gleaned from the many other empirical studies of divorce Hetherington has been involved with over the years, as well as the research of others, make this book a page-turner and an extremely enjoyable read. …