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and the nature of advice.
Publisher:  Scribners, 1997
ISBN:  0-684-81343-2
Comments:  The third book I have read by the author of "Listening to
Prozac".  This book had me hooked from the first chapter.  This guy seems
to be some kind of thought clone of mine.  For instance, as the subtitle
suggests, the book is also very much about "the nature of advice".  As an
example, the author tells a short story about being asked by a newly
bereaved husband if his kids should attend their mother's funeral.  While
most of the important stuff is in the context that I leave out here, the
cut-to-the-chase response was; "Either will be wrong.  It is not good or
bad for the kids to go to the funeral.  It is bad to have your mother die
when you are young."  There are also good little one-liners as well, like;
"we consistently underestimate the otherness of others".  The title of the
book is daunting and scary to me.  The subtitle is perhaps a more accurate
description of what the book is all about.  Be forewarned tho, I think his
style of writing is generally somewhat verbose and obtuse, and this book
has a very odd way of trying to talk directly to YOU.  I think his style
here is really an acquired taste, probably not a good book for someone who
is currently depressed and finds it difficult to concentrate.

Author:  David Karp
Title:  Speaking of Sadness
Publisher:  Oxford University Press, 1996
ISBN:  0-19-509486-7
Comments:  The author is a Sociology professor, writing about his own
depression and depression in general from a sociological perspective.  It
is a bit "academic", and kind of heavy reading.  Written as a sort of
exploration of clinical case studies, but perhaps more for fellow
Sociologists and the "nondepressed" then for others with depression.  Just
too dense for me.   <->   This book used to be in the "Books I have seen up
close and personal but have not read" list.  I inadvertently took it out
from the library a second time thinking that I had never seen it.  When I
started to read it, however, it seemed *very* familiar.  (I may be slow,
but I am not a total idiot.)  This time I read the whole book.  (Obviously
the book has not changed.  Apparently *I* have.)  I understand why I wrote
my initial thoughts on this book.  Those feelings are still there, but this
time I liked it a little more.  It seems to me very much like the book
"Waking Up, Alive", by Richard A. Heckler.  I think the author provides
some interesting insights, but he still losses my interest when he gets on
his "sociologist" soapbox.  The author writes of his motives for writing
the book: "I am not primarily interested in explaining what causes
depression nor how to cure it .... I am interested in how depressed
individuals make sense of an inherently ambiguous life situation."

Author:  Augustus Y. Napier
Title:  The fragile bond:  In search of an equal, intimate, and enduring
marriage.
Publisher:  Harper & Row, 1988
ISBN:  0-06-015984-7
Comments:  I took this book out from the library several weeks ago, and I
am now on my second "late notice".  I like this book a lot, but it is a
pretty long book and it is not completely easy reading.  It is not a novel,
but I think it is well written and reasonably readable.  It is not a "how
to" book with advice on how to communicate better with your spouse or
whatever.  Gawd, you'd think I might find more to say about it.  If you are
interested in reflecting in multiple perspectives about yourself and your
relationships with others, then this might be a good book to at least look
at.  How's that??

Author:  Peter D. Kramer, M.D.
Title:  Moments of engagement;  Intimate psychotherapy in a technological age
Publisher:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1989
ISBN:  0-393-70075-5
Comments:  Peter Kramer is the author of the much more popular "Listening
to Prozac".  But this book is much less of a general
philosophical/sociological/political statement.  This book is more an
exploration of what the author thinks it is like, or should be like, to
practice psychotherapy.  I agree with him in that I think this is one of
those books that all psychotherapists should read.  I think it is sometimes
kind of obtuse, dense, or needlessly meandering in its prose, but it is
also packed with a lot of good stuff.  I mean, where the Hell does he get
this stuff??  He just keeps coming at you with it.  He can't say one thing
without reflecting about it's multiple potential meanings, and then of
course, his choice of those meanings as opposed to others also has meaning,
and back and back we go into this house of mirrors.  But I love that "fun
house" ride.

Title:  Waking Up, Alive: The Descent, the Suicide Attempt, and the Return
to Life
Author:  Richard A. Heckler, Ph.D.
Publisher:  Grosset/Putnam, 1994
ISBN:  0-399-13945-1
Comments:  The jacket cover says; "In this extraordinary book, psychologist
Richard A. Heckler tells the whole story of the descent, the attempt, and
... finally and gloriously we read of the return to life."  That alone
almost made me want to puke.  But I am glad I got beyond it and into the
book.  The author juxtaposes bits and pieces of people's stories, as told
in their own words.  Of course he has an agenda and he abstracts general
concepts from these juxtaposed snippets.  But he did not totally swamp me
with some kind of "life is, in the end, always worth living" moral fable.
The book starts out with a quote from the Ba'al Shem Tov (a Jewish
religious leader): "When the bond between heaven and earth is broken, even
prayer is not enough....only a story can mend it."  This book is really a
secondary abstraction of a personal story.  It is more a story of a story,
told not fully in the original story tellers words.  But it is also not a
statistical/academic study.  It is, to me, better than a sort of tertiary
story of a story of a story.  It worked for me.  The only problem I had
with it was that it never really dwelled for long in that purgatory place
of multiple suicide attempts.  Many of the people described multiple
attempts, but the focus of the book was always on movement towards the
*last* and final attempt.  The turning point where these people began to
move back towards life.  But hey, the book can't do everything.

Author:  Lori Shiller and Amanda Bennett
Title:  The Quiet Room:  A journey out of the torment of madness.
Publisher:  Warner Books Inc., 1994
ISBN:  0-446-51777-1
Comments:  This is a really good book.  I suppose that one way to rate
books is by how long it takes me to read them.  I read this one in about 3
days.  The author Lori Shiller suffers from schizo-affective disorder.  She
has symptoms of schizophrenia and manic depression.  In this book, she
describes her 20 year battle with her emotions and the voices inside her
head.  Several chapters are written by her family, friends, or therapists.
These chapters are all the more poignant, because Lori could not (then nor
now) describe much of her own experience.  It was, in her words, "beyond
all imagining, beyond all human hope".  A long hard road for her is a
wholly inadequate understatement, but I personally feel all the richer for
her description of it.

Author:  Bruno Bettelheim and Alvin A. Rosenfeld
Title:  The art of the obvious:  Developing insight for psychotherapy and
everyday life.
Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1993
ISBN:  0-679-40029-X
Comments:  This is a really good book.  It is very hard for me to write
these little summaries when the book was really good.  I think this was
written mainly for "therapists-to-be", but I found it easy to read and I
wish that every therapist (esp. those who work with children) would read
it.  In a way, it is all about assuming that people's actions have
important meanings, no matter how childish, odd, or "illogical" the actions
appear to be.  The goal of therapy is for the therapist, and thus the
patient, to take a patient seriously enough such that both are interested
in working together to try and find the meanings.  It can get a little
"Freudian" at times, because Bruno Bettelheim was a self-described "third
generation" Freudian psychoanalyst.  But he was much less "ridged" than
Freud himself appears to have been or to have been made out to be.  Perhaps
because Bettelheim did not have a new theory to promote.  Here is a quote:
"Self-discovery is tremendously valuable to the person who discovers
himself.  To be discovered by somebody else has never done any good to
anybody."

Author:  Bruno Bettelheim
Title:  Dialogues with mothers.
Publisher:  The Free Press of Glencoe, Crowell-Collier, 1962
ISBN:  (Library of Congress #62-10583)
Comments:  This is a pretty "dated" book.  Bruno Bettelheim conducted a
discussion group with mothers of young children (most under 5) who were
living on the University of Chicago campus in the late 40's after World War
II.  The book is a sort of transcribed dialog of this group.  I think his
approach to this discussion group was really great.  It's focus is on
asking the right questions, not on giving the right answers.  But the
dialog style of the presentation got hard to read after a while, and the
"potty training" issues kind of wore thin for me.  Still, this book is
probably a thousand times better than 99% of the "how to raise a child"
books that you might find in the average library.

Author:  Dr. Susan Forward
Title:  Toxic Parents:  Overcoming their hurtful legacy and reclaiming your
life.
Publisher:  Bantam Books, 1989
ISBN:  0-553-05700-6
Comments:  The title of this book is a little strong, but it fits the book
pretty well.  This is probably a better book if you had a more overtly
abusive childhood than mine.  However, anyone who ever felt or feels at
times overwhelmed by their parents might do well to read it.  It is a
little too "blaming" for me, tho it tries not to blame but rather to place
responsibility where it should have been, and where it should be.  I think
for me, I liked the book Emotional Incest by Patricia Love better, but they
are somewhat similar.  If you liked one, you might want to read the other.

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