The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780674047679)

Adulthood today is undergoing profound transformations. Men and women wait until their thirties to marry, have children, and establish full-time careers, occupying a prolonged period in which they are no longer adolescents but still lack the traditional emblems of adult identity. People at midlife struggle to sustain relationships with friends and partners, to find employment and fulfilling careers, to raise their children successfully, and to resist the aging process.

The Prime of Life puts today's challenges into new perspective by exploring how past generations navigated the passage to maturity, achieved intimacy and connection, raised children, sought meaning in work, and responded to loss. Coming of age has never been easy or predictable, Steven Mintz shows, and the process has always been shaped by gender and class. But whereas adulthood once meant culturally-prescribed roles and relationships, the social and economic convulsions of the last sixty years have transformed it fundamentally, tearing up these shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.

Mintz reconstructs the emotional interior of a life stage too often relegated to self-help books and domestic melodramas. Emphasizing adulthood's joys and fulfillments as well as its frustrations and regrets, he shows how cultural and historical circumstances have consistently reshaped what it means to be a grown up in contemporary society. The Prime of Life urges us to confront adulthood's realities with candor and determination and to value and embrace the responsibility, sensible judgment, wisdom, and compassionate understanding it can bring.

Author: Steven Mintz
ISBN-10: 0674047672
ISBN-13: 9780674047679
Publisher: Belknap Press
Language: English
Published: 04/07/2015
Pages: 432
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.70lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.30w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2015
Booklist 03/15/2015 pg. 33
Library Journal 04/01/2015 pg. 107
New York Times Book Review 06/28/2015 pg. 34
New York Times Book Review 06/21/2015 pg. 1
Choice 09/01/2015