Dinner talk

the long version

In this book, Shoshana Blum-Kulka demonstrates that dinner-table conversations are like holograms, each one a complete, if fuzzy, picture of the diners' culture and their procedures for socializing their children. She has put together 102 such meal-time conversations, to give us a fully configured, sharply focused picture of how children become members of their parents' culture, and how parents' behavior shifts to accommodate new cultural influences.