The Children's Culture Reader

In Sacred Bond: Black Men and their Mothers, Keith M. Brown has gathered 35 interviews with black men on a subject close to their hearts. Accompanying b&w photos by Adger W. Cowans, these short pieces become meditations on motherhood but also on the challenges of raising a black man in America. Author tour. (Little, Brown, $25 288p ISBN 0-316-10556-2; Nov.) According to editor Henry Jenkins, The Children's Culture Reader ""is intended both to explore what the figure of the child means to adults and to offer a more complex account of children's own cultural lives."" He has compiled a selection of essays by the likes of Philippe Aries, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Henry Giroux, Martha Wolfenstein and Lynn Spiegel to analyze ""how our culture defines what it means to be a child, how adult institutions impact on children's lives, and how children construct their cultural and social identities."" (New York Univ., $75 500p ISBN 0-8147-4231-9; paper $24.95, -4232-7; Nov.) Cynthia A. Kierner debunks the myth of the delicate flower of Southern womanhood in Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. From the earliest settlements onward, Southern women worked hard and long to provide the underpinnings of life in a new land. Examining the influence of slavery, religion and the dominance of the ideals of republican politics and of gentility, Kierner shows how these women were kept in their place for more than a hundred years. 22 b&w photos. (Cornell Univ., $49.95 304p ISBN 0-8014-3453-X; paper $17.95 -8462-6; Nov.)