A young psychologist's deeply moving stories about her patients—stories that turn out to be astonishingly revealing about the author's psyche. Slater's first book focuses on the early days of her career, when she worked with chronic schizophrenics at an East Boston mental institution. In the title piece, she meets the six men- -Moxi, Joseph, Charles, Lenny, Robert, and Oscar—who comprise her first therapy group and with whom she struggles to form a connection. For Slater, forming connections—``finding your self in the patient and the patient's self in you''—is what therapy is all about. Eventually, the young therapist discovers a thread of sense in Joseph's extraordinary linguistic chaos; in his ``tossed-up word salads,'' she sees ``diced up apples of desire, green leaves of love.'' Oscar, who is seriously delusional, often catatonic, and grossly overweight and slovenly, is the subject of another unusually sympathetic piece. Although connecting is the goal of therapy, it can seem at times almost too personal: Slater's account of connecting with a threatening young sociopath, for example, makes for tense reading. Most disturbing of all, however, is the final account, in which the author visits a patient in the same mental hospital where she herself was confined for long periods between the ages of 14 and 24. (Although she doesn't specify the reason she was institutionalized, Slater does refer to ``the raised white nubs of scars that track my arms from years and years of cutting.'') All that sets her apart from any of her present patients, Slater insists, is ``simply a learned ability to manage the blades of deep pain with a little bit of dexterity.'' What helped her get better, she says, was not psychiatrists' treatments but their kindness. Kindness—even tenderness and love—permeates these engaging accounts, which are often reminiscent of Annie G. Rogers's recent A Shining Affliction (p. 693). In both, eloquent young psychologists reveal their private miseries and their concerns about the therapeutic process. (First serial to Harper's; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44785-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
Full of interesting factoids–-but the blatant advertising for Kushner's products is pervasive to the point the book becomes...
A wake-up call about caffeine from a committed and self-interested author.
Formerly a newspaper journalist in Russia who consumed enormous amounts of coffee and cigarettes, Kushner relocated to New York City during the early '90s. Shortly thereafter, she learned she suffered from Celiac disease, a genetic disorder that was perhaps exacerbated by products containing caffeine. She researched caffeine substitutes, none of them suiting her tastes. And she discovered that certain substitutes contain gluten, another substance that those with Celiac cannot tolerate. Thus, she "invented" soy coffee and uses this book as her marketing platform. It's frequently informative, though, once the the text moves beyond pure publicity. For instance, she mentions that England's King Charles II attempted to shutter coffeehouses in 1675 because men tended to neglect their families while staying out to consume caffeine. Widespread protest, though, defeated the ban; the Boston Tea Party of 1773 resulted in the consumption of coffee as a patriotic duty; the world's first espresso machine began making noise in France in 1882; Maxwell House coffee is named after a Nashville hotel; US coffee sales boomed during the 1920s thanks to Prohibition; the US imported 70 percent of the world’s coffee crop at the beginning of WWII; Starbucks opened its first store in Seattle in 1971. These are just a few pieces of coffee trivia the author offers. She also briefly discusses the history of the American addiction to caffeine, explaining the chemistry of the substance, listing specific health threats (heart disease, central-nervous-system disorders, ulcers, cancer) and mapping out specific routes to end dependency. Unfortunately, though, the style interferes with the substance, as the tone is often shrill and alarmist. An appendix titled "Make a Difference!" is the call to action here, urging readers to petition the FDA for fuller disclosure among coffee manufacturers of specific product caffeine levels.
Full of interesting factoids–-but the blatant advertising for Kushner's products is pervasive to the point the book becomes soporific.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9747582-0-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An adequate guide for running high-performance workgroups within a corporate setting, but far from a guaranteed formula for...
A satisfactory business study confirming the old business saw that 10% of the people do 90% of the work.
According to Annunzio's analysis, only 10% of elite information workers work in high performance-workgroups. The remaining 90%? Apparently they labor away as modern-day Bob Cratchits, in environments that neither demand nor deliver optimal performance. Ebullient accounts of the ideal workplace are nothing new in business nonfiction, nor are the lugubrious tales of moribund organizations. The author rarely notes here, though, anything we haven't heard a million times before from Tom Peters, Steven Covey, or even Donald Trump. Her maxims are boilerplate business clichés: value people; optimize critical thinking; seize opportunities. But basing a formula for business success on such bland principles is problematic, since they are so vague as to be meaningless. Do companies fail because they neglect to do such things? Most failures had nothing to do with workgroup functioning; instead, they stemmed from lack of foresight and, more commonly, simple bad luck. Nonetheless, Annunzio does proffer good advice for companies that wish to maximize the performance of their workgroups. First, identify those that are performing at a high level, those that can provide evidence of profit/revenue growth along with product, service, or process innovation. Second, work on bringing average groups up to maximum performance. More importantly, avoid destructive behaviors such as micromanagement, bureaucratic interference, resource and information hoarding, politics, and control. She also makes the astute—and cost-saving—observation that before hiring high-priced consultants to solve business problems, companies might consider consulting their own employees, who are more likely to know the answers.
An adequate guide for running high-performance workgroups within a corporate setting, but far from a guaranteed formula for business success.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-59184-060-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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