Outsider in the Promised LandOutsider in the Promised Land

"Like Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, my family's move into a predominantly Jewish suburb "just growed." Moving into and living in the white, suburban community of Skokie, Illinois, was a multi-decades long experience that I needed to review forty years after that life-changing decision. I wanted to gather impressions beyond the bare facts of buying a house, a thing that millions of people do routinely, and the expected routine of an academic research paper filled with numbers and mind-numbing data. I hope this record reaches into human spaces and tugs out human responses. I asked myself, how did the rresponse conditions, and actions that precipitated and facilitated changes from a familiar, comfortable, community and friends actually work for a family of two " average American" parents and their children?" -- from preface (p. 3).