Book Review: Social Capital in America: Counting Buried Treasure

discussion could isolate stressful life events in these narratives, such as going to jail or dropping out of high school, and examine how stressful life events contribute to weaker social relationships. While this book is a must-read for scholars interested in understanding the difficulties fathers residing in poor urban areas face, it is not void of weakness. For a course centered on a broad topic, such as gender or family, this book is clearly narrowly focused. The decision to understand fathering in the inner city through solely interviewing males can be problematic for teaching a course intended to provide both male and female perspectives because the narratives presented in the book are void of the female perspective. Edin and Nelson make it clear that “[t]his is the story of disadvantaged fathers living in a struggling rustbelt metropolis at the turn of the twenty-first century” suggesting the narratives of both the mothers and their children can be found elsewhere (p. 17). In the introduction, Edin and Nelson openly state, “The voices of the women these men share children with only rarely enter in, for example, and this is intentional; their stories have already been told” (p. 16). With the focus narrowly on men, this book could be supplemented with literature, such as Edin and Reed’s (2005) article, “Why Don’t They Just Get Married? Barriers to Marriage among the Disadvantaged,” to help students gain a more thorough understanding of parenting in poor urban areas. Although the narrow focus on fathers may be a weakness of this book as a teaching tool, this is also one of Doing the Best I Can’s strengths. This strict emphasis on the men in these families will provide students with a fresh understanding of unwed fathers extending beyond the stereotype of the poor urban male who gets a woman pregnant and leaves to avoid fathering. These rich narratives allow the authors to “offer a strong corrective to the conventional wisdom regarding fatherhood in America’s inner cities” (p. 17). The weakness of a narrow male focus is outweighed by the deep understanding of how these fathers “grapple with shifting contexts over time” (p. 17). Overall, Doing the Best I Can could be useful for both undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of courses, such as gender, family, and urban studies. Doing the Best I Can is a gripping narrative of the lives of economically disadvantaged men doing their best to father in the inner city. The introduction is written simply enough to help students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels understand the intent of this study along with how Doing the Best I Can has changed the way poor unwed fathers are regarded in America. To illustrate previous public sentiment concerning poor unwed fathers, Edin and Nelson begin by quoting 2007 presidential candidate Barack Obama as saying, “There are a lot of men out there who need to stop acting like boys, who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception, who need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one” (p. 1). By moving their family into a two-bedroom apartment in East Camden, New Jersey, and allowing 110 poor unwed fathers to tell their stories, Edin and Nelson have demonstrated that it is not courage that these men lack but the necessary resources to be the involved fathers many of them yearn to be. I highly recommend incorporating Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City into undergraduate and graduate family sociology, gender studies, and urban studies courses.