Author Talk | Family with Professor Meredith Francesca Small

Professor Meredith Francesca Small will be at the Parkway Central Library on Thursday, October 29, to talk about her new book, Family: How the Need for Connection Shapes and Forms Our Lives. It's an author talk, so you'll hear her discuss the work directly rather than just reading it on your own.

Small is an anthropologist and Professor Emerita at Cornell University, and that background is exactly where the book comes from. She approaches the subject from two different angles at once: an evolutionary one and a cross-cultural one. The evolutionary side looks at the biological and ancestral drivers that push us toward others, while the cross-cultural side examines how different societies actually build and define family in practice. Together, they're meant to explain why we have such a compelling need to make families in the first place.

If you've ever wondered why the drive for connection feels so fundamental—and why it takes so many different forms across the world—that's precisely what she's digging into here. It's a look at the impulse to belong, and how that impulse shapes the way we organize our lives around the people we choose to keep close.

The talk is on Thursday, October 29, at 6 PM in the Heim Center Room 131/132, inside the Parkway Central Library at 1901 Vine Street in Philadelphia.