Mary Catherine Bateson

This important book shares insights derived from surveys, interviews, and focus groups conducted with a diverse group of first-wave Baby Boomer female professionals (born 1946–1956). These individuals changed the workplace in the 1970s and are now changing views of retirement.In Thriving in Retirement: Lessons from Baby Boomer Women, profiles of highly diverse professional women are interwoven with information gleaned from surveys, interviews, and focus groups, thereby allowing readers to identify with individuals similar to themselves, whether through profession, education, personal concerns, or demographics. In spite of dissimilarities in backgrounds, career paths, and personal experiences, these women have much in common. As they leave their full-time careers, they are committed to exploring new post-career identities while finding ways to stay engaged, share their professional expertise, and develop deeply held personal interests and passions they may have set aside in the past. The Baby Boomer women profiled here reveal details such as the early influences on their education and career choices, the aspects of their careers they enjoyed the most, the opportunities and roadblocks they encountered, as well as how they balanced marriage and family responsibilities with their careers. Readers will benefit from the examples set by these women, whose diversity and varying experiences provide inspiration for nearly anyone of retirement age who finds herself wondering "What's next?"

Thinking Race argues that racism results from a misguided blending of biological facts with pernicious socially constructed ideas. This book aims to help readers accept the reality of human difference while understanding human unity. The esteemed author team of Richard A. Goldsby, a biologist, and Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropologist, recognize race as primarily socially constructed but also having biological reality. They argue that misunderstanding the nature of race stands in the way of addressing and solving the problems of our current racial climate. The book addresses controversial subjects, exploring whether or not race-associated biological differences are differences that might impact mental ability, medical practice, or athletic performance. Because the black/white divide is a dominant and continuing theme of U.S. history and culture, the book devotes a good deal of attention to these groups, while also covering Native Americans and Asian Americans. Thinking Race provides a thoughtful and nuanced case for viewing race as a cultural play in an ancestral theater. This perspective, anthropological and biological, will build a framework for thinking about race and provide conceptual tools for better understanding and addressing this charged and often pernicious notion.

Mary Catherine Bateson--author of the landmark bestseller Composing a Life--gives us an inspiring exploration of a new life stage that she calls Adulthood II, a result of the longer life spans and greater resources we now enjoy. In Composing a Further Life, Bateson redefines old age as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and challenges us to use it to pursue new sources of meaning and ways to contribute to society. Bateson shares the stories of men and women who are flourishing examples of this "age of active wisdom"--from a retired boatyard worker turned silversmith to a famous actress to a former foundation president exploring the crucial role of grandparents in our society. Retiring no longer means withdrawing from life, but engaging with it more deeply, and Composing a Further Life points the way.

This reissue of Bateson's treatise on the improvisational lives of five extraordinary women uses their personal stories to delve into the creative potential of the complex lives of today, where ambitions are constantly refocused on new goals and possibilities.

Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life, is our guide on a fascinating intellectual exploration of lifetime learning from experience and encountering the unfamiliar. Peripheral Visions begins with a sacrifice in a Persian garden, moving on to a Philippine village and then to the Sinai desert, and concludes with a description of a tour bus full of Tibetan monks. Bateson's reflections bring theses narratives homes, proposing surprising new vision of our own diverse and changing society and offering us the courage to participate even as we are still learning.