A practical blueprint for fixing marriages.
A licensed clinical social worker and marriage counselor offers a helpful guide on “attachment-based” couples’ therapy and how to find the right therapist.
In this no-nonsense marriage repair manual, debut author Miller draws on his own marriage and years of counseling others. According to Miller, “Choosing the wrong kind of therapy…is the fastest way to send your relationship into a downward spiral.” However, Miller offers good news: if you choose the right therapist and the best therapy for your needs, “you and your partner stand a good chance of benefitting tremendously.” The author examines the experiences of real couples during counseling via various therapeutic approaches. For example, he discusses Jack and Irene’s frustration during their initial round of counseling. The couple chose a therapist practicing cognitive behavioral therapy, which minimizes the role of feelings in a relationship. But after hitting a wall, Jack and Irene came to Miller and found success with his attachment-based therapy. According to Miller, CBT often fails because it tries to fix aspects of a couple’s relationship without “understanding the root cause of their problems.” Trying to ignore feelings or fake an attachment are poor coping techniques because, he writes, “New science about the brain says that whether we recognize it consciously or not, feelings are always involved in our behavior.” In Chapter 3, Miller lays out the fundamentals of attachment-based couples’ therapy and devotes a chapter each to the three principal methodologies: Imago, Gottman Method, and Emotionally Focused Therapy. The book’s final section addresses practical issues, including the cost of therapy, how to find the right therapist, and the value of premarital counseling, sex therapy, and relationship coaching. Interested readers will find that Miller’s easy-to-read guide is well-organized and practical. Couples looking to hit the ground running will appreciate that his advice is mostly devoid of counseling jargon. He makes it easy to understand the various therapeutic techniques by allowing readers to listen in on dialogue between counselor and couple sprinkled with hopeful notes of encouragement.
A practical blueprint for fixing marriages.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909169-3-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Love Good Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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