STARTING AT HOME: Caring and Social Policy

A professor of education at Stanford, Nodding takes a thorough look at the history and future of the "care" movement, an offshoot of feminism that has its roots in (women's) relational experience. Beginning in the home and family with notions of "good people" and "the best homes," Noddings finds that genuine attention to and care for others and ourselves may be all we need: "We need not manufacture principles that precede us in the world or lie beyond us in some transcendent realm. All normal human beings avoid pain and dread its extremes." (Apr.)