Social Capital

home to the Creation Museum. Others have made lesser-known contributions to history, like Titusville, Pennsylvania, which is the site of the first drilled oil well. Many others are former industrial cities like Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Rockford, Illinois, which were forced to retool and reinvent themselves when their once-robust manufacturing industries fell prey to deindustrialization and suburbanization. Others are sleepy small towns that Soderlind came upon by chance. Along the way, Soderlind connected with family and friends from her past and grew a new appreciation of intergenerational ties and family legacy. An amusing motif, illustrating the theme that we can continue to grow and learn new skills even with advanced age, was Soderlind’s reminders that her father followed her travels on social media. Yet the book’s most resonant theme may be how relationships shape our lives, and how those relationships we take for granted may indeed be the ones we should appreciate most. Two critical turning points (spoiler alerts) are the death of her beloved canine companion Colby and a return trip to New York to celebrate Jessica’s fiftieth birthday—occasions that crystallize for Soderlind the book’s final observation that love is ‘‘worth all the sorrow’’ that comes with loss. This book is a surprising choice for Contemporary Sociology, which typically features books written by and for sociologists. Soderlind is an essayist, journalist, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Manhattanville College, where she teaches courses in narrative nonfiction and memoir. As such, the book does not have an overarching research question or hypothesis, a method, or literature review. It does not cite a single reference. There is no methods section, end notes, or appendix. However, it could be an excellent supplemental reading for an undergraduate or graduate level course on narrative, as Soderlind expertly weaves her personal stories and positionality throughout her observations of her cross-country journey. The Change was published as part of University of Wisconsin Press’s ‘‘Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies’’ series, which includes more than three dozen memoirs authored by a diverse group of LGBTQ scholars. Other books in the series convey the experiences of being a gay Jew in Nazi Berlin, a therapist who has grappled with their own mental illness, a survivor of sexual abuse, a soldier deployed to Iraq, and a gay man growing up on a banana plantation in rural Colombia. The Change, taught with other books in the series, could provide rich insights into the vast diversity of experiences among LGBTQ persons in a course on sexualities. Selected chapters of the book also may be useful for an Urban Sociology course. I personally found the lively and surprising local histories to be the most engaging and interesting (and sociological) parts of the books; readers’ reactions to the author’s personal ruminations and sense of humor may be a matter of taste. The Change is not intended to be an academic book, nor should it be judged as one. Rather, Soderlind has authored a 200page long personal meditation on one woman’s relationships, choices, crises, and capacity to bounce back from and grow stronger from these crises—in ways very similar to the trajectories of decline and reinvention experienced by the towns and cities she encountered on her journey. The extended metaphor is effective and thought-provoking. Readers will be prompted to think about the choices and coincidences that have shaped their lives, the losses they’ve experienced, and the lessons learned through loss, and they may be inspired on their own paths to reinvention and redirection.