I have finished The Way We Never Were, so I will attempt to review it. A bit about the book's politics first- while Coontz tries to portray herself as a moderate, often offering run downs of liberal and conservative takes on certain family issues, she takes a more liberal approach, seeing economic and social factors as things that cause certain family formations instead of moralizing or saying that the devil caused women to become single parents to defy god or something.

Basically, it was a pretty well written and informative book. Coontz succeeds pretty well in cutting through the hysteria with facts. The only area which I thought was a bit sensationalized was the one about the black family, but it's really hard for a white(?) author to accurately talk about it, and she did a pretty good job of not saying "well, those lazy blacks are inherently different and evil, that's why they have those alien family styles', but about talking about how history and economics intersect to cause problems. I really liked the approach she uses- talking about the historical background and the economic trends that cause certain family styles to be more adaptive is a lot more useful to my understanding than just screaming about how the family is falling apart.

All in all, I recommend this if you want to actually learn about the family rather than hearing self serving moralizing. Historical amnesia doesn't serve us well if we want to solve our problems.