Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991

Divorce à la Mode

By Keith Thomas
Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987
by Lawrence Stone

Oxford University Press, 460 pp., $29.95

A third of all marriages in England and half of all those in the United States, according to recent estimates, will end in the divorce court. We are still saddened, sometimes even shocked, when a friend's marriage breaks up, but divorce is no longer a matter for scandalized concern. We have come to accept it as a normal feature of life, though opinions differ over whether it should be bracketed with cancer and AIDS as a curse of our times or celebrated along with aspirin and anesthetics as a welcome liberation from past miseries.



Review, 4214 words

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