A compassionate and eye-opening approach to healing mentally and emotionally wounded soldiers.
A revolutionary look at methods to treat veterans in distress.
Alpern (Divorce: Rights of Passage, 2000) draws on decades of experience dealing with combat soldiers returning to civilian life in order to distill some essential lessons in his plainspoken book. He began his service as a neuropsychiatric technician in 1954 at an Army hospital in Pennsylvania and has seen firsthand the various ways—some embarrassingly simple, others complex—that many customary protocols for treating the problems of veterans ultimately fail the people they’re intended to help. The author aims his own findings and approaches at three main groups, the obvious target audience of this volume: the veterans themselves, their families and loved ones, and Alpern’s fellow mental health workers. His book breaks down the daunting intricacies of his subject into basic components: chapters dealing first with the phenomenon of veterans transitioning to civilian life, then with the common but wrongheaded ways these returning soldiers have been treated for their various psychological issues, then a chapter outlining the right ways to address these difficulties, and then two chapters elaborating on procedures that work. At every stage, Alpern, a Korean War veteran, stresses the alien nature of these ailments. “Many of the dysfunctional behaviors of our returning warriors (suicide, anger, hermitizing, the inability to relate to loved ones or common civilian tasks) are the direct result of the soul-destroying actions, fostered by extraordinary circumstances, in which a sizable number of soldiers have engaged,” he writes, adding emphatically: “There are no pills to heal such soul wounds!” His passages on the strain veterans’ families face are at times heartbreaking (wives describe feeling as though they haven’t regained their husbands but rather acquired an additional—and very troubled—child). The core of the author’s approach is in retrospect startlingly apparent: the people best qualified to help suffering veterans are other veterans. The hugely readable book’s most instructive section targets an exclusive audience: invaluable advice on how veterans can train to become mental health professionals (“Vets almost universally believe that they can be understood only by vets who have ‘been there’…Vets, through training, military ethics, and, especially, human bonding, are highly motivated to help other vets”).
A compassionate and eye-opening approach to healing mentally and emotionally wounded soldiers.Pub Date: May 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62217-927-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: WaveCloud Corporation
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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