The Dynamics of Connection

Reviews / Votes

This is a wonderful book that begins with the riddle of nurturance and Bowlby's famous account of attachment and care-giving, but it is what the author does in the next seven chapters that is even more remarkable. He traces the evolution of care-giving from reptiles to mammals to humans, and then he explores the neurological underpinnings of care-giving and attachment, offers a theory of care-giving and attachment, develops a model of relationship formation, and finally, outlines the nature of familial attachment In this book, Bell provides a model for exploring the evolution of biological propensities underlying fundamental social processes. This is not naive sociobiology or even evolutionary psychology; it is what I term evolutionary sociology at its very best because it does not reduce sociology to biology but shows how analysis of biology and evolution can make sociology a more robust and interesting discipline. This book, I hope, represents a harbinger of good things to come as sociology ends its century-long boycott of biology and, in so doing, becomes a more mature explanatory science. -- Jonathan H. Turner, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside Bell provides an unusually rich, conceptually deep, multidisciplinary perspective on attachment and caregiving. His analysis is strikingly novel in many respects yet firmly rooted in the extensive literature on these topics. Bell's query begins with his personal experiences, as a husband, parent, and initially alien yet very close observer of Japanese family relationships. Trained as a sociologist, he nevertheless focuses on personal feelings, especially the feeling of caring, and pursues 'love' from the level of sociology and culture to the level of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. The book is extremely engaging, although intellectually demanding, and it is beautifully written throughout. It offers a great deal to think about if you are interested in the biology, psychology, or anthropology of human emotions and relationships. -- Phillip R. Shaver, UC Davis, co-editor of the Handbook of Attachment This ambitious merger of sociology, biology, and psychology finds that the human experience of "attachment" is neither deterministically evolutionary nor altogether socially constructed, but rather a function of varieties of nurturance in dyadic parent-to-child and child-to-parent interactions....Recommended. * Choice Reviews *