WERE YOU BORN FOR EACH OTHER?

by Kevin Leman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 1990

Pop-psych advice for firstborns and last bores that is of middling profundity, readability, and usefulness. Presuming that parents demand much of their firstborn and coddle their last born, the oldest child, psychologist Leman says, will grow up to be a conscientious control-freak while the youngest will be a carefree, egotistic spendthrift. But by Leman's own argument, even these presumptions of parental behavior should depend upon the birth order of the parents involved--a factor he rarely discusses. Leman can, however, chart the compatibility of a male firstborn with younger sisters and a female last born with older brothers (said to be a good match), but his discussions of middle borns tend to be tenuous (""there are almost as many types of Middle Borns as there are stars in the sky""). Leman's Freudian, nurture-over-nature approach sounds thinnest when claiming that male promiscuity is learned and not innate. For the most part, though, the romantic and marital advice here is quite sound. Truisms about opposite personalities making the best marriages are what differentiate this book from his more generalized The Birth Order Book and Growing Up Firstborn (1989). Leman does offset his gratuitous repetitions with chatty, sometimes funny, writing, but readers might occasionally prefer some hard statistics to down-home phrases such as ""I would be willing to wager. . ."" Minus the filler and with the addition of supporting statistics, this would have made a fine article for Psychology Today.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION