With a Daughter's Eye: Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, A

Margaret Mead was one of my heroines when I was growing up. How fascinating to read this biography which is a blend of intellectual and up close and personal history of her. To have her husband, Gregory Bateson included is icing on the cake. Mary Catherine has done an extremely creditble job. For example, she writes, "Margaret always emphasized the importance of recording first impressions . . . for . . . the informed eye has its own blindness as it begins to take for granted things that were initially bizarre." As I read of Margaret's reaction to Mary Catherine's wedding -- that it must be a format that reflected Margaret and Gregory's place in the world, rather than just the personal joy and celebration of a daughter, I had to wonder if Mary Catherine ever connected the above passage to her own children. This daughter writes with a fairly clear eye about her parents. They are neither great untouchable icons, nor are they flawed little humans. I suspect she did a great deal of balancing in her own emotions to come up with the portraits she painted because, in truth, we have three portraits here, all interconnected and somehow, ongoing. Not a superficial book.

Book, as described.

Too much dry detail and not enough sharing of a daughter's unique perspective on a very unusual set of parents.

excellent!

It is an excellent en famille view of both Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, It also imparts a sense f what they contributed to their remarkable daughter.

Open-eyed eye-opener - as only a literate daughter could tell it.

This is a curious memoir by the daughter of iconic public intellectuals. It was of great interest to me for personal reasons: both of her parents were household names during my childhood as my mother was a social scientist and my father a psychiatrist. The people of their milieu - Erik Erickson, Ruth Benedict and many others - were the lodestars of my childhood and it was not until mid-life that I felt I had outgrown them. In contrast, Ms. Bateson joined that milieu as an equal, contributing to her parents' work as well as establishing a realm of her own in Middle East studies and linguistics.With 2 very busy parents who were often absent, Ms. Bateson was brought up in an extended household of friends and relatives, almost a communal lifestyle in Manhattan of all places. This was balanced by extremely intense intellectual relationships with each of her parents, whose divorce meant that she spent time alone with them on extended trips and quality time. She paints portraits of each of them - their methods, intellectual style, and preoccupations - that are brilliantly vivid, the backdrop to the mind that she developed and put to use as an academic in her own right.If there is a weakness in the book, it is the spottiness of coverage of ideas in a comprehensive academic sense, with scholarly literary review, etc. Either they are dated or I didn't get into their ideas as much as I might have done. Nonetheless, there are many colorful stories that describe the way they interacted with Ms. Bateson and others, more a memoir, also very valuable as intellectual history with a personal touch.Ms. Bateson is a truly wonderful writer. Her book is charged with observations and brilliant asides, which evoked the charm of this kind of thinking. For example, she writes: "the care of an infant is a perfection of creativity and delight that few can achieve in any other kind of work." I would have to agree.

I am so sad - today I heard of Mary Catherine Bateson's death on January 2, 2021. I have loved this book for many years. Her scholarship on Arabic poetry (and her command of Persian) and anthropology make for a fascinating life on its own. She generously speaks of her famous mother; my favorite tale is of Margaret Mead as a happy mother and professor, reacting to one of her female graduate student's complaint that she can't get any work done "because the baby cries so much." "Nonsense," says Mead, "You can't get any work done because the baby laughs so much!" Bateson's father was a towering figure in modern philosophy and a giant of a man. I am going to reread this book of wonderful stories and wisdom!