PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Timothy Black is Associate Professor of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author and co-author of two award winning books: When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Street and On Becoming Teen Mom: Life Before Pregnancy, with Mary Patrice Erdmans. Sky Keyes has devoted his life to providing direct services to and advocacy for underrepresented and at-risk populations. Currently, he is working on the front lines at the Homeless Prenatal Program to support families hardest hit by the Bay Area's housing crisis. His past work includes police brutality, anti-war, prison, and labor activism; mental health counselling in an acute psychiatric unit; and housing case management for dually diagnosed clients in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.
It's A Setup is sociological storytelling at its best: existentially lush, analytically trenchant, and emotionally wrenching. Drawing on a rich set of lifestories and repeated interviews with a multiethnic cohort of marginal men, Black and Keyes take us inside the world of poor fathers like no study before them. By showing how these men struggle to 'man up' and become good fathers in spite of deteriorating economic conditions, punitive welfare, aggressive courts, voracious prisons, and the pull of the streets, they set new standards for the sociology of social marginality, masculinity, and neoliberal public policy at ground level in polarizing America. -Lo c Wacquant, University of California at Berkeley, and author of Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer and Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality Finally, a book that brings together the array of social and economic processes that undermine the wellbeing of so many fathers in the contemporary United States. From economic restructuring to welfare reform to child support provision to public housing policy, Black and Keyes detail the many obstacles that make poor men so vulnerable as fathers. And they analyze how men continue to struggle and cope as parents with enormous sensitivity and insight. Produced from a unique sociological collaboration, It's a Setup makes an enormous contribution to understandings of the politics of fatherhood and of social inequality more broadly. -Lynne Haney, Professor of Sociology, New York University This is the book we have been waiting for: It's a Setup offers a gripping, compelling analysis of the experience of fatherhood for low-income men. Beautifully written, it helps us understand large-scale economic changes, and then does a deep dive into the intimate details of the father's lives: the economic strain a child's birthday brings and the on-going squabbles with the child's mother. Highly recommended. -Annette Lareau, author of Unequal Childhoods
