Maybe One

...The advantage of siblings is vasty exaggerated, according to McKibben...

...There's no set of statistics to explain...

...they would also be good for children themselves...

...This is hardly a new idea...

...why it felt odd, why it felt a little shameful, why it felt sad," he writes...

...The father of a four-year-old daughter, he decides to get a vasectomy...

...By limiting his own family to one, he is able to do other things: work on Adirondack conservation issues, belly-dance, and teach Sunday school...

...Nor is there evidence to suggest that limiting family size will reduce family consumption...

...Still, Bill McKibben is worried...

...And he salts the clinical A Love Song In the photograph, the four of us stand together: my grandmother, mother, and I in a blurred circle of breasts, and my daughter, hip-high in the foreground, smiling into the sun...

...Over a couple generations, he says, the impact of sustained low fertility could change the composition of the family itself...

...What is new and provocative is McKibben's rationale for only one-child families...

...How do we prevent this demographic disaster...

...James B. Gilbert, author of Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945--i 968 pa$17.95 0-8142-0786-3 cl $39.95 0-8142-0785-5 280 pp To the Pole The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925-4927 Edited by Raimund E. Goerler "In 1996, Ohio State University archivist Goerler discovered among Byrd's papers a faded diary that the explorer had used as both a journal, and . . . a message pad to communicate with [his] pilot . . . . [This] diary may validate the claim that he was indeed the first to fly over the top of the world...

...Children would grow up with parents and grandparents but would have no siblings, cousins, aunts, or uncles...

...But the chief problem with McKibben's argument is that it treats children as if they were costly consumer items on a par with cars...

...Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's most recent book is The Divorce Culture (Knopf...

...Citing research studies on only children, he argues that they are likely to do better in school, have more friendships, display more flexibility in gender roles, show more interest in science, math, and literature, and have higher self-esteem than kids burdened with siblings...

...But the campaign never got off the ground, partly because fertility was already declining among Baby Boomers...

...He is deeply concerned about the damages and depredations caused by too many people on too little land...

...To begin with, he fails to contend seriously with a competing and well-supported scenario of population implosion...

...Michelle Moore findings with evidence from sitcoms and his own anecdotes of fights with his brother...

...Such a transformation of the family would surely have a profound impact on our sense of social solidarity, obligation, and future orientation, Eberstadt observes...

...and his contributors to this impressive collection on violence in the modern western world brilliantly illuminate the relationship of masculinity to various rituals of personal and group ferocity . . . . For anyone interested in violence both here and abroad, Men and Violence is absolutely indispensable and opens new paths for further study.'--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida pa$17.95 0-8142-0753-7 c1539.95 0-8142-0752-9 280pp Fallout A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons Paul Bayer "Bayer ties the contorted history of reaction to the nuclear age to the changes in history itself...

...Despite low birth rates, the population is likely to reach 400 million by 2020, nearly double its current size...

...S~I1 his argument for the one-child family population solution is ultimately unconvincing...

...Too, McKibben's sweeping case against siblings is biased and distorted...

...It is mid-summer ten years ago when the mountain ash turned willow and wept for a field to lie down in, holding ground in a withering shroud of brown, and we are certainly no different-my mother, chin tilted against the tug of years, and my grandmother's groomed defiance giving in at the gumline...

...Rather, his argument for the one-child family is an appeal to individual conscience and voluntary action...

...In his environmental calculus, there is very little difference between formula-guzzlers and gas-guzzlers...

...This devaluation of children also contributes to a devaluation of childrearing as an adult vocation...

...At the same time, he resists the temptation to call for coercive government measures or even mild social pressures Men and Violence Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America Edited by Pieter Spierenburg "Pieter Spierenburg...

...Though he acts on his prindples, he confesses very human misgivings...

...After all, the birth rate in the United States currently stands below replacement levels, and current demographic predictions, both here and in Europe, suggest that small families are here to stay...

...Commonweal 2 | May 8, 1998...

...These families would not only be good for the environment...

...Or how my mother, the mother of four, routinely weeps for the child not living, her eyes dammed up to what's left...

...Publishers Weekly cl $19.95 0-8142-0800-2 160 PP~,~A Ohio State University Press 1070 Carmack Rd Columbus, OH 43210 OHIO 800-437-4439 STATE Commonweal 2 0 May S, 1998 to limit population...

...Or the reason why my arms form a shawl for my daughter's girl-thin shoulders, grateful for a place to rest...

...McKibben is persuasive, in part because he is that rare thing: a passionate environmentalist and an eminently reasonable man...

...McKibben's own exemplary conduct notwithstanding, I fear that a nation of Cleavers without Beaver may become a nation where June and Ward buy bigger houses and cars and dedicate themselves to doing their own thing...

...Even in third-world countries, the birth rate is declining...

...He asks men and women to think and talk about overpopulation in the most personal terms "as a matter of how many children you or I may bear...

...McKibben is also persuasive because he practices what he so fervently preaches...

...One of the best parts of the book deals with his account of his unexpected bout of post-op tristesse...

...This makes Bayer's most important point quite persuasive: that the nuclear age is not just (or even primarily) a question of policy, but rather a question of culture...

...And in America, the most individualistic nation in the world, this demographic trend could dramatically accelerate social atomization...

...We face a population crisis, he tells us, because Americans are living longer...

...Perhaps most impressive of all, McKibben does not try to claim moral-courage points for ending his own reproductive life...

...He relies heavily upon a single study based on small clinical samples of individuals in therapy where sibling incest, aggression, and conflict figure far more prominently than they do in the general population...

...He does advocate reducing the quotas on immigration, however...

...In a recent article in The Public Interest, Nicholas Eberstadt painstakingly documents a pattern of worldwide fer~lity decline and paints a futuristic portrait of a graying world population with over 55 percent of the world's women past reproductive age...

...This natural increase in population means that Americans will face a host of problems ranging from carclogged highways to the collapse of the Social Security system...

...McKibben believes that there are better uses for adult energies and resources than raising a bunch of children...

...McKibben's solution is to call for a little procreative thrift: Give up the two-childfamily...

...But there is no evidence to support the idea that parents with one child are more altruistic than parents with two or more...

...A decade later, noting a rapid and unanticipated decline in the birth rate, Ehflich proclaimed the population trend in the United States a "success story...

...Stop after one...

...Given this highly selective reading of the evidence, it is not surprising that siblings fare so poorly...

...Indeed, he claims that having fewer children will free parents to make the world a better place...

...What this picture doesn't speak of is how my grandmother took to wearing her husband's workboots when he died, the hard-soled bathroom acoustics echoing-up a heart...

...Thirty years ago, Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book, The Population Bomb, called upon Americans to limit family size and to wage a campaign against big families...