Community Bookstore and 

The Ethical Parenting Group of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture Invite you to a discussion with 

Jeremy Adam Smith, author of 

The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

It’s a growing phenomenon among American families: fathers who cut back on paid work in order to focus on raising children. But what happens when dads stay home? What do stay-at-home fathers struggle with–and what do they rejoice in? How does taking up the mother’s traditional role affect a father’s relationship with his partner, children, and extended family? And what does stay-at-home fatherhood mean for the larger society? 

In chapters that alternate between large-scale analysis and intimate portraits of men and their families, journalist Jeremy Adam Smith traces the complications, myths, psychology, sociology, and history of a new set of social relationships with far-reaching implications.  As Smith explains, stay-at-home dads represent a logical culmination of fifty years of family change, from a time when the idea of men caring for children was literally inconceivable, to a new era when at-home dads are a small but growing part of the landscape.

Thursday July 23 at 7pm

Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture

53 Prospect Park West @ 2nd Street

2,3 to Grand Army Plaza, B,Q to Seventh Avenue, F to Seventh Avenue

This event is free and open to the public.

Refreshments provided.

Childcare is available by RSVP, for $5

(212) 920-4483 or akindred@gmail.com

Jeremy Adam Smith is senior editor of Greater Good magazine, and founder of Daddy Dialectic– a group blog that explores the experiences of twenty-first century dads.  His writings have appeared in publications including The Nation, BusinessWeek.com, Mothering, and Wired.  A former stay-at-home dad, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

“Jeremy Adam Smith is a most purposeful father, a periodic stay-at-home dad who sees his role as not just a choice that’s best for his family but as a sign of a rapidly changing societal landscape… his new book, The Daddy Shift, is a chronicle of a time that he predicts we will look back upon as the start of permanent change.”– Lisa Belkin, The New York Times

For more information please visit www.bsec.org or www.communitybookstore.net

Please join us for another illuminating evening as we read and discuss The Lover by Marguerite Duras. From the back cover:

Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras’s childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France’s colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

We hope to see you here!

Come along for another evening of translated fun. This month, we’re reading The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine.

From the back cover:

In 2003, Osama al Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father’s deathbed. As the family gathers, stories begin to unfold: Osama’s grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching tales are interwoven with classic stories of the Middle East. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the beautiful Fatima; Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders; and a host of mischievous imps. Through Osama, we also enter the world of the contemporary Lebanese men and women whose stories tell a larger tale, both heartbreaking and hilarious, of war, conflicted identity, and survival. With The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century.

Read the New York Times review here.

For our next meeting, the Nonfiction Book Club will read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, just out in paperback. Pollan is a very engaging, compelling writer, who will make you think twice about what and how you eat. In his most recent book, he takes on the industrialized Western diet and its detrimental effects on our bodies and culture. Come find out why he thinks that much of what we eat doesn’t qualify as real food and why that real food needs defending.

Feel free to bring something to eat — though we may question your choice!