Word: bateson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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MARGARET MEAD: A LIFE by Jane Howard; Simon & Schuster; 527 pages; $19.95 WITH A DAUGHTER'S EYE by Mary Catherine Bateson; Morrow; 242 pages...
Biographer Jane Howard (A Different Woman, Families) spent five years studying the making of Margaret Mead. Mead's only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, has, like most children, gone through a lifetime trying to understand her mother and her father, British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Both women have produced fascinating portraits of a stubbornly enigmatic subject...
...Bateson. Other anthropologists brought data home from the field; she returned with new husbands as well...
...could be exacting with colleagues, she was scarcely less demanding of her friends. People she had not seen for a while were subjected to "marathons of conversation, often exhausting." From Samoa to Greenwich Village, it seemed, she was everybody's mother-an irony not lost on Mary Catherine Bateson, now an anthropologist herself, who judged Mead to be "less than fully nurturant" when it came to her own daughter. Bateson expresses bittersweet amusement at her mother's boast that when Baby Cathy was six weeks old, "we let the nurse go and took care of her ourselves...
Howard's biography is shrewd and intelligent and supplies all the details about Margaret Mead, down to her recipe for salad dressing. Bateson's memoir is more an act of poetic intuition. Yet she is blunter than Howard about her mother's affairs with lovers of both sexes, and more specific about the earth mother's need to be mothered herself...