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Chavis, Geri Giebel, ed. Family: Stories from the Interior. St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1987. A wonderful collection of short stories organized around the themes of husband-wife, mother-son, mother-daughter, father-son, father-daughter, and sibling relationships. Authors include Willa Cather, John Updike, John Cheever, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many others. Reading these short stories is a great way to test your ability to recognize family communication patterns in action.
Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. In this social history of the family, Coontz places current concerns about the family into historical perspective. Demolishing myths about the family, she discusses such topics as parenting, privacy, love, sex roles, feminism, and sex.
Galvin, Kathleen M., Carma L. Bylund, and Bernard J. Brommel. Family Communication: Cohesion and Change, 7th ed. (Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2007.) This is a new edition of a highly comprehensive and readable introduction to communication in the family.
Kory Floyd and Mark T. Mormon, eds. Widening the Family Circle: New Research on Family Communication. (Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage, 2006.) Family relationships include more than marriages and biological child-parent relationships. Floyd and Mormon widen our understanding of family communication by presenting articles by respected scholars on topics such as step- and adoptive-families and relationships with grandparents, in-laws, and siblings.
Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: The Free Press, 1988. This book chronicles the transformations of family life from the godly family of the colonial era to the radically diverse family types of the 1980s. The authors trace developments in families of the white middle and working classes, American Indian, and African-American cultures.
Nichols, Michael P. The Power of the Family: Mastering the Hidden Dance of Family Relationships. New York: Fireside Books, 1988. Nichols, a family therapist, brings systems theory to life by demonstrating how a fictional teenage son’s rebellion is linked to the behavior of every member of his family. Nichols takes a variety of issues ranging from sibling rivalry to divorce and shows how the issue reverberates throughout the family system. A highly readable introduction to the complexities of family life.
Rubin, Lillian. Families on the Faultline: America’s Working Class Speaks about the Family, the Economy, Race, and Ethnicity. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Rubin, a sociologist and psychotherapist, interviewed nearly 400 working-class men, women, and children. Updating her classic work World of Pain (written in 1976), she paints a portrait of working-class families whose shattered dreams have given new impetus to psychological and political divisions based on race and ethnicity. While she does not focus specifically on communication, Rubin clearly shows how the social and economic changes of the past twenty-five years serve as a backdrop for family and community interaction.
Satir, Virginia. Peoplemaking. Palo Alto, Calif.: Science and Behavior Books, 1972. A book that truly blends theory about families with practical, engaging activities that any family can use to better understand itself. It is written in a lively style and intended as a workbook for families interested in changing some of their rules and family structures.