Born In The 40s

Take a stroll down Memory Lane with this wonderful collection of photographs of Britain in the 1940s, which evokes those Happy Days when everyone pulled together to defeat Hitler and kept smiling despite the hardship of the post-war years.

Like many young men that were born into the era immediately following the end of World War II, George Brondsema was brought up with the belief that there was no higher calling than to serve one's country through military service. Patriotism was undeniable, and following in the footsteps of your father, who had just defended this country, made this an easy choice for many young men. In early 1965, most people in the United States had probably never even heard of Vietnam and wouldn't be able to locate it on a map. Over the next decade it would become all too familiar. This is a story of one young man's experience in dealing with a war that divided a nation and made us more cynical as a people. There have been many books written about this time and place in history-this is just one man's experience, and doesn't attempt to speak for all those who spent their youth and subsequent life dealing with the aftermath. One thing is crystal clear, however-these young men didn't create this war or lose it. Not one major battle was ever lost! These men were made to feel that they somehow failed the country, but the reality is that this country failed them.

This book offers an empirically informed understanding of how cultural, autobiographical and absent memories of orphanhood interact and interconnect or come into being in the re-telling of a life story and construction of an identity. The volume investigates how care experienced identities are embedded within personal, social and cultural practices of remembering. The book stems from research carried out into the life (hi)stories of twelve undervalued ‘historical witnesses’ (Roberts, 2002) of orphanhood: women who grew up in Nazareth House children’s home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Several themes are covered, including histories of care in Northern Ireland, narratives and memories, sociologies of home, and self and identity. The result is an impressive text that works to introduce readers to the complexity of memory for care experienced people and what this means for their life story and identity.

​This book provides the keys to understanding the trajectory that Japanese society has followed toward its lowest-low fertility since the 1980s. The characteristics of the life course of women born in the 1960s, who were the first cohort to enter that trajectory, are explored by using both qualitative and quantitative data analyses. Among the many books explaining the decline in fertility, this book is unique in four ways. First, it describes in detail the reality of factors concerning the fertility decline in Japan. Second, the book uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to introduce the whole picture of how the low-fertility trend began in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s and thereafter. Third, the focus is on a specific birth cohort because their experiences determined the current patterns of family formation such as late marriage and postponed childbirth. Fourth, the book explores the knife-edge balance between work and family conditions, especially with regard to childbearing, in the context of Japanese management and gender norms. After examining the characteristics of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances of postwar Japan in detail, it can be seen that the change in family formation first occurred drastically in the 1960s cohort. Using both qualitative interview data cumulatively from 150 people and quantitative estimates with official statistics, this book shows how individual-level choices to balance work and family obligations resulted in a national-level fertility decline. Another focus of this book is the increasing unintended infertility due to postponed pregnancy, a phenomenon that is attracting great social attention because the average age of pregnancy is approaching the biological limit. This book is a valuable resource for researchers who are interested in the rapid fertility decline as well as the work–life balance and the life course of women in Japanese employment practice and family traditions.

Looks at personal finance for middle aged persons covering such topics as choosing a financial advisor, investments, college costs, real estate, and estate planning.

Iran is a key player in some of the most crucial issues of our time. But because of its relative diplomatic isolation and the partisan nature of conflicting accounts voiced by different interest groups both inside and outside the country, there is a shortage of hard information about the scale and depth of social change in today's Iran. In this volume, and imposing roster of both internationally renowned Iranian scholars and rising young Iranian academics offer contributions--many based on recent fieldwork--on the nature and evolution of Iran's economy, significant aspects of Iran's changing society, and the dynamics of its domestic and international politics since the 1979 revolution, focusing particularly on the post-Khomeini period. The book will be of great interest not only to Iran specialists, but also to scholars of comparative politics, democratization, social change, politics in the Muslim world, and Middle Eastern studies.