This Is Our Story

This is Our Story

Humanity United in Action,
Driven By Love and Compassion,
Informed by Science and Reason.

MENUMENU
  • Home
  • Read This First
  • About
  • Cycle-of-Life Season
    • 1 Dormancy
      • Week 01: Human Worth
      • Week 02: Universality
      • Week 03: Justice
      • Week 04: Suffering
      • Week 05: Humility
      • Week 06: Avoiding Harm, or Evil
      • Week 07: Engaging the World
      • Week 08: Order
    • 2 Sowing
      • Week 09: Preferences (Desire)
      • Week 10: Autonomy
      • Week 11: Life as a Journey
      • Week 12: Renewal
      • Week 13: Hope and Optimism
      • Week 14: Self-esteem (Self-worth begins)
      • Week 15: Self-confidence
      • Week 16: Independence (Self-competence)
    • 3 Growth
      • Week 17: Our Future
      • Week 18: Honesty
      • Week 19: Obligation in the World
      • Week 20: Duty toward Others
      • Week 21: Awakening
      • Week 22: Obstacles and Opportunities
      • Week 23: Individuality and Community
    • 4 Ripening
      • Week 24: Honoring
      • Week 25: Excellence
      • Week 26: An Ethic of Generous Service
      • Week 27: Openness
      • Week 28: Transcendence
      • Week 29: Wisdom
      • Week 30: Caring
      • Week 31: Courage
      • Week 32: Citizenship
    • 5 Interlude
      • Week 33: Grounding and Well-Roundedness
      • Week 34: Assertiveness
      • Week 35: Restoration
    • 6 Fulfillment
      • Week 36: Creativity
      • Week 37: Truth
      • Week 38: Love
      • Week 39: Faith
      • Week 40: Rebirth
    • 7 Assessing
      • Week 41: Home and the Past
      • Week 42: Vitality
      • Week 43: Self-actualization and Integrity
      • Week 44: Connectedness
      • Week 45: Empowerment
      • Week 46: Equality
    • 8 Harvest and Celebration
      • Week 47: Flourishing
      • Week 48: Focus and Perspective
      • Week 49: Change
      • Week 50: Finding Our Niche
      • Week 51: Accepting / Surrendering
      • Week 52: Living Religiously
      • Week 53: Celebration and Remembrance
  • Weekdays
    • Sunday
    • Monday
    • Tuesday
    • Wednesday
    • Thursday
    • Friday
    • Saturday
You are here: Home / Cycle-of-Life Season / 3 Growth / Family

Family

Claude Monet, The Dinner (1869)

Family is among our most enduring and important institutions. It is a product of our evolutionary past, and therefore written on our DNA.

Real

Documentary and Educational Films

  • March of the Penguins, an exploration of how penguins struggle to survive, raise their young and pass life on to the next generation
  • March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step (L’Empereur)

True Narratives

Book narratives:

  • Terrance Hayes, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018): “ . . . a meditation on family . . .”
  • Charles Wheelan, We Came, We Saw, We Left: A Family Gap Year (Norton, 2021): “Inspired by a backpacking trip he took with Leah in the late ’80s, Wheelan rekindles a longtime wish to reprise this journey with kids in tow. He notes that ‘experiences, rather than things, are what make us happy in the long run,’ because they become an 'ingrained part of our identity.'”
  • Russell Shorto, Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob (Norton, 2021): “Shorto’s search for his long dead grandfather and namesake, Russell ‘Russ’ Shorto, involves F.B.I. documents, newspaper archives, police records and, most difficult of all, deeply intimate communication with his own father, Tony. Russ, a boss of bookies and tough guys, was a taciturn power broker in southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1940s and ’50s whom no one, not even his son, seems to have known very well.”

From the dark side:

  • Camilia Kouchner, The Familia Grande: A Memoir (Other Press, 2022), “an indictment of incest that started a national reckoning.”

Imaginary

Visual Arts

  • Salvador Dali, Reading. Family Scene by Lamplight (1981)
  • Marc Chagall, Fisherman's Family (1968)
  • Pablo Picassso, Family (1965)
  • Norman Rockwell, A Family Tree (1959)
  • Paul Klee, Siblings (1930)
  • Egon Schiele, The Family (1918)
  • Boris Kustodiev, At Home (1914-18)
  • Pavel Filonov, Peasant Family (1910)
  • Pablo Picasso, Harlequin's Family (1905)
  • Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Woman and Two Children (1901)
  • Mary Cassatt, The Family (1893)
  • Eduoard Manet, The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874)
  • Lawrence Alma-Tadema Roman Family (1868)
  • Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Italian Family (1759)
  • Antoine Watteau, The Mezzetin's Family (1717)
  • Rembrandt van Rijn, Family Group (1666-68)
  • Rembrandt van Rijn, The Holy Family Night
  • Jacob Jordaens, Self-Portrait Among Parents, Brothers and Sisters (c. 1615)

Film and Stage

  • Wild Bill: an ex-convict eventually comes to value his teenage sons

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

The Carter Family recordings are iconic early country music. These are not classically trained musicians but their performances evoke how a singing family with no special musical talent might aspire to sound.

Richard Strauss, Symphonia Domestica (Sinfonia Domestica), tone poem for orchestra, Op. 53, TrV 209 (1902) (approx. 45 minutes): “Fairy tales often end with the wedding of two lovers and the phrase ‘happily ever after.’ We who live in the real world, however, sometimes wonder what happens after the fairy tale has ended and the hero and heroine have settled down to make a home, have children, and (we hope) lead an exemplary life.” “The Symphonia Domestica is a multi-movement symphony in six continuous and motivically interlaced movements, which describes a twenty-four hour life-cycle in the Strauss famille.” Strauss explained what the work was about: “A day in my family life. It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous – a triple fugue will together portray papa, mama, and baby. . . What can be more serious than family life? I want the Symphonia domestica to be understood seriously.” Top performances are by Furtwängler & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944; Strauss & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1944; Krauss & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1951; Reiner & Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1956; Szell & Cleveland Orchestra in 1964; Mehta & Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1968; Kempe & Staatskapelle Dresden in 1972; Karajan & Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1973 ***; Zinman & Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich in 2002, and Roth & SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg in 2014.

Other compositions:

  • Dahl, Music for Brass Instruments (1944)

Albums:

  • Balimaya Project, “Wolo So”: “Balimaya” means “essence of kinship” in Maninka.
  • Muhal Richard Abrams, “Familytalk” (1992) (70’): “Trumpeter Jack Walrath, Patience Higgins (on tenor, bass clarinet, and English horn), bassist Brad Jones, drummer Reggie Nicholson (who also plays marimba and bells), Warren Smith (vibes, timpani, marimba, and gongs), and Abrams (on piano and synthesizer) all have their spots to interact, and the wide variety of colors that Abrams achieves from this instrumentation is always unpredictable.”

Albums, in the family:

  • Slava & Leonard Grigoryan, and Joseph & James Tawadros, “Band of Brothers”

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

  • Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies: A Novel (Catapult, 2019): “These vignettes are sharp-eyed, sharp-edged and carefully deployed in a multigenerational jigsaw that’s as evasive as it is evocative.”
  • Amanda Eyre Ward, The Jetsetters: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2020): “Charlotte Perkins, a widow in her early 70s, wins a contest for a Mediterranean cruise, and invites her adult children to come along. Behavior is atrocious. Family secrets are exposed. Reckonings and reconciliations are had.”
  • Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel (W.W. Norton, 2020): “An Actress Descends Into Madness, and Her Daughter Picks Up the Pieces”
  • Liane Moriarty, Apples Never Fall: A Novel (Henry Holt & Co., 2021): “. . . a wifty tale of domestic suspense, and a satisfying, layered family drama where the tension comes from the treachery of memory, the specter of generational violence and the effects of decades’ worth of unspoken resentments that have curdled over time.”
  • Mirian Toews, Fight Night: A Novel (Bloomsbury, 2021): “The reader is pulled into the intimacy of a dysfunctional family whose unconditional love would make any truly dysfunctional family jealous. The three women stand alone, together, against the universe, so closely molded against one another’s jagged edges that their individual outlines blur.”
  • David Guterson, The Final Case: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022): “In this novel, Guterson is not really writing about who done it, or even why. His subject is family love, and its silent passions grip the reader like a steady, racing current.”
  • Monica Ali, Love Marriage: A Novel (Scribner, 2022): “Monica Ali explores the ripple effect of one union on two households with deep secrets.”
  • Joseph Han, Nuclear Family: A Novel (Counterpoint, 2022), “is . . . focused on fallout — from war, from family obligation, from all that goes unsaid — and what it takes to move forward after a disaster.”
  • Eleanor Brown, Any Other Family: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2022): “. . . Eleanor Brown shows how nonstop togetherness can lead to tension, injury and, occasionally, joy.”
  • Oscar Hokeah, Calling for a Blanket Dance: A Novel (Algonquin Books, 2022): “At the heart of 'Calling for a Blanket Dance' is a profound reflection on the intergenerational nature of cultural trauma. Hokeah’s characters exist at the intersection of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican identity, which provides a vital exploration of indigeneity in contemporary American letters.”
  • Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Latecomer: A Novel (Celadon Books, 2022): “The Siblings in This Book Loathe Each Other, and It’s So Refreshing . . . Jean Hanff Korelitz takes on complicated family dynamics, infidelity, race, class, religion, guilt, art and real estate.”
  • Catherine Steadman, The Family Game: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2022): “Harriet, a.k.a. Harry, the narrator, has just announced her engagement to the preternaturally rich and charming Edward Holbeck. But surely there’s a better way for her to get to know his relatives than through their annual ‘Krampusnacht’ tradition, which entails being stalked in the dark by a grotesquely hairy, seven-foot-tall homunculus dripping with blood and saliva?”

Poetry

Books of poems:

  • Kevin Young, Stones: Poems (Knopf, 2021), “about family, about death and about how families absorb and repurpose loss; the stones here bear names and life spans.”

August 24, 2010

Previous Post: « Tradition
Next Post: Living in Community and Fellowship »
  • Email
  • Twitter

Topics

Acknowledging Anticipation Appreciation Belonging Choosing Confidence Focus Honoring uniqueness Judgment Motivation Planning Prudence Remembrance Restraining Retreat Reverie Self-knowledge Tenacity Transcending ego Week 01: Human Worth

Web Developers Studio
© 2023 ThisIsOurStory
About | FAQ