Nothing groundbreaking, but a friendly, supportive guide for navigating relationships.
A psychotherapist offers advice about how to be, and keep, a friend.
Barth (Integrative Clinical Social Work Practice, 2014, etc.), whose Psychology Today blog frequently focuses on women’s friendships, draws on interviews with diverse women to examine the “magical, meaningful, and surprisingly difficult” connections they make with friends. Friendships, she writes, “can make us feel simultaneously special and outcast, loved and unlovable, vulnerable and strong, helpful and useless, angry and happy, alone and lonely, supportive and held.” From the testimony of her interviewees as well as research, she finds that women’s friendships often are characterized by emotional intimacy, trust, respect, and honesty. But friendships take many forms: some women consider friends to be occasional companions rather than confidantes; some want friends to visit often, while others are fine catching up on social media. Some women obsess over not having a large enough number of friends (an obsession exacerbated by Facebook), while others feel happy with just a few. “Research has found that friendships support mental and physical health in a variety of ways,” writes the author, but “the number of friends is less important than the role they play in your life.” In fact, “so-called superficial links can provide many of the same outcomes as more intense bonds.” After an overview of friendships, Barth devotes most of the book to problems, including disillusionment, betrayal, rejection, exclusion, competition, sexual tension, anger, setting boundaries, and loss. Each chapter, filled with vignettes and anecdotes, ends with a section titled “What You Can Do." For anyone lamenting not having enough friends, the author suggests a simple solution: “try to make and stay in some kind of contact with other people.” For anyone dealing with sexual tension or a friend who changes gender, “sometimes talking about things is the best solution, even when it feels like the hardest.” For those grieving, “research shows that taking care of yourself physically and maintaining connections with your own support system are important tools in the healing process.”
Nothing groundbreaking, but a friendly, supportive guide for navigating relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-87027-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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