Sincere but unconvincing.
A psychiatrist presents 10 case studies from his 20 years in private practice.
Suffused with religious overtones, Briddell’s stories of his patients and their treatments all follow a neat, well-organized path from illness to recovery (or redemption). An elderly compulsive hand-washer learns to deal with dirt and finds love at 82; a businessman suffering from uncontrolled vomiting obtains a job better suited to his personality; a woman dying of cancer, whose family becomes unglued, faces her childhood problems and her cancer goes into remission; a victim of a serious head-injury, suffering from memory loss and anxiety, learns to enjoy his forced retirement; and an unkempt teenager aroused by women’s bowel movements is cured of his predilections and learns to get along with his family. Briddell explains that he did not always have this level of success. Early in his career he discovered to his surprise that patients did not always respond to scientifically validated treatments, as they were often too emotionally damaged to make the necessary changes. What they needed, he decided, was nurturing and human kindness, and he revised his own methods accordingly. Readers looking for inspiration in neatly packaged stories might enjoy these accounts, but they hardly provide a realistic picture of the work of psychotherapy. Briddell’s patients are remarkably free of ambivalence about their illness and they neither resist his interpretations nor balk at any of his suggested regimens. Furthermore, Briddell’s apparent conversion from “scientist” focused myopically on his patients’ symptoms to a kind of New Age empathizer viewing his patients as “heroes” is somewhat curious, and basically unexplained. A reader might well wonder about the specifics of Briddell’s revised approach, and some of the failures in treatment that led him to reconsider his earlier outlook.
Sincere but unconvincing.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24249-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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