Book Reviews 173 Ethnic Families in America: Patterns and Variations. Ed. by Charles H. Mindel and Robert W. Habenstein. (New York: Elsevier, 1976. xiii + 429 pp. Tables, notes, and references.) Containing essays on sixteen different ethnic groups, this volume not only surveys the experiences of Americans of European, Oriental, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and African heritage but also provides overviews of such socioreligious minorities as the Amish, Mormons, and Jews. Believing that ethnicity manifests itself principally in family patterns, the authors focus on the interaction between tradition and new experience among ethnic families in America. The contributors provide data on intermarriage, fertility, kinship and sibling relations, and family values. Twenty of the twenty-two contributors are sociologists, and most of their data are drawn from socio- logical literature published within the last thirty years. Their collective work yields a much more precise portrait for the period since 1920 than for earlier periods and, as a corollary, a more comprehensive survey of recent than of older immigrant groups. Irish-Americans, for example, receive only cursory treatment in a weak chapter, and German-Americans are left out. George A. Kourvetaris, however, contributes a subtle analysis of dynamic changes within three generations of Greek families in America. Francis X. Femminella and Jill S. Quadrango draw on the work of Rudolph Vecoli and Richard Gambino to explore the effects on family patterns of longstanding prejudice against southern Italians within Italy. Richard Staples adds an insightful chapter on the Negro family. The editors justify this volume partly by pointing to the continuing debate over whether America has been a melting pot or a salad bowl and partly by referring to the ethnic resurgence of recent years. Yet most contributors actually point to the declining distinctiveness of ethnic family patterns, whether measured by the frequency of exogamy, divorce, attenuating kinship ties, or emerging egalitarian relationships among family members. Although solidarity periodically revives in the face of prejudice, ethnic family patterns seem to be better correlated with social class than with ethnicity as such. In this connection, several contributors have the dis- concerting habit of contrasting ethnic groups with "Anglos" or "the WASP majority," as if the latter was a monolith rather than a configuration of cultural groups divided along regional and class lines. Some of the con- ceptual fuzziness that surrounds the current "ethnic resurgence" pervades this volume as well. Yet it is equally clear that the social class variable fails to account for the differences between, for example, working-class Italians and working-class Negroes, or between middle-class Poles and middle-class Jews. Historians interested in exploring such issues further will find valuable information and abundant insight in Ethnic Families in America. UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA JOSEPH F. KEn