Great Place to Raise Kids

Kieran Bonner is professor of sociology and legal studies at St Jerome's University.

"This is a very readable, witty and ... poignant book. The epilogue is particularly moving." The Camrose Canadian. "This is a provocative attempt to situate the urban-rural debate within a dialogue on the relations of social theory to everyday life. Bonner carefully and skillfully guides us through the thickets of contemporary discourses on the various approaches to the theorizing of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical analysis, bu showing the impressive attempt to join theory and practice." Alan Blum, Sociology and Social and Political Thought, York University. "Bonner's book is the result of a Canadian study of the effect of place on child rearing ... Bonner's personal narrative provides the backbone of a study to determine why residents of his new town feltthat rural areas are better places for children than cities ... This approach employs a radical interpretive methodology that has its roots in phenomenology and hermeneutics and will be of as much interest to scholars of the sociology of knowledge as to those interested in rural sociology or the sociology of the family." CHOICE. "A Great Place to Raise Kids attempts something innovative and long overdue, namely, testing a taken-for-granted conceptual framework. The empirical investigation of the rural life-world in terms of its meanings for the residents of that world is a significant contribution to sociology. The study is also a significant contribution in that it extends as well as implicitly critiques investigations conducted in the past on regional and rural-urban contrasts in Canadian society." Rosalind Sydie, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta.