Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition

In Full Circles, Overlapping Lives, cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson gives us a new way of looking at ourselves, our families, our communities-indeed at the very concept of identity in a changing world. Writing with the clarity and gentleness that touched the many readers of her bestselling book Composing a Life, Bateson opens our eyes here to the meaning of life in a culture at the crossroads.

Bateson begins with a premise at once startling and deeply resonant: we live with strangers-and with strangeness-not only in the shifting worlds of our cities and neighborhoods, but within our families and ourselves. Yet as she explores her own life and the lives of her remarkable students, an even more profound insight emerges: strangeness and love are not contradictory. Listening across generations, weaving together the shining strands of family narratives, pondering the questions of fidelity and connection, exploration and illness, vision and improvisation, Bateson creates a prism through which we can all glimpse facets of our true selves.

At once intimate and far-reaching, haunting and reassuring, Full Circles, Overlapping Lives reflects the wisdom and the love of an extraordinary lifetime.

Mary Catherine Bateson is the Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and divides her time between Virginia and the Monadnock region of New Hampshire. She has written and co-authored eight books, including Composing a Life and With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (named one of the best books of 1984 by The New York Times), and is president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York City.


From the Hardcover edition.