This is an amazing forgotten book. Anyone who wants to understand how to analyze culture through film and literature should read this and see how the masters did it. Cultural studies types really need this book to understand something about methodology. Who would have ever thought that Mead wrote about France and Russia! It just goes to show you that just when we think we have made intellectual progress people like Mead and Metraux surface and prove that we are just reinventing the wheel.

Anyone who thinks that Margaret Mead only concerned herself with adolescents in Samoa is in for a surprise. This book shows how much anyone concerned with MODERN culture is in Mead's debt. This book, written in 1953 was decades ahead of the crowd in understanding complex societies, and in formulating research methods. Fully 120 (!) researchers working under Mead's leadership investigated China, France, Eastern European Jewish Culture, Russia and Germany. They had astonishingly penetrating, fascinating insights into these and a dozen other societies documented in this study. Their analysis of film, poetry, and psychological literature for these societies is without parallel, and amazing for the 1950's. This book is a treasure. My gratitude to the publisher (Berghahn Books) for republishing it!

I just stumbled on this book looking for resources on French culture that went beyond literature, wine and cheese for my students. What a revelation this was! Who knew that Margaret Mead ever wrote anything on France! This is an amazingly perceptive work--still vital and astonishing after 50 years. The astonishing part is that it centers on the structure of the French family, giving a totally different picture of French culture than most Americans ever encounter. As one who has lived with a family in a French village, I found myself continually smiling and nodding in agreement. This book should be read by every student studying French civlization, and everyone contemplating living in that country. I am assigning it to my students, and will give copies as presents this Christmas. Katherine Anderson-Levitt in her introduction puts the entire work in perspective for a contemporary audience, including translations of reviews from French sociologists when the book first came out. This belongs on the bookshelf of every Francophile, and everyone who cares about the anthropology of contemporary societies.