A pleasantly informal guide for new and midcareer social workers.
Debut author and licensed clinical social worker Rounds offers an introspective guidebook for counselors looking to learn new skills.
The author begins by asking her readers to define their motivations for becoming professional counselors. She shares her own personal stories (“I was fascinated by the discussions I heard my father having with other men….I was able to focus on how I could effectively enter the conversation without being told to leave”) as well as her counselor husband’s (“People come to pastors with many emotional, intellectual, relationship, spiritual and other needs. I found myself ill prepared to deal with the depth of needs which were presented to me”) and her student intern’s. Along the way, she gives readers lots of opportunities for self-reflection. For example, she asks them when they first learned about injustice, how they learned to be good listeners, and who were the biggest influences in their lives. (She includes blank lines for readers to write their responses down.) Later chapters include information on different counseling approaches, the use of transference when relating to clients, and how to know when it’s time to retire. Rounds also pays a great deal of attention to methods for dealing with clients who may be con artists and manipulators—something that a typical social worker’s grad school curriculum may not cover. The book’s second half offers “Tool Box” sections—practical scripts that counselors may use to employ concepts described earlier in the book. For example, a “THOUGHTS-TO-FEELINGS-TO-ACTION” chart can show at-risk clients how to avoid getting into trouble that could land them in jail. The author’s personal anecdotes give her book a conversational tone, as if she’s mentoring the reader. Some of the tales don’t serve a clearly defined purpose, though, including one about her parents having lunch in a restaurant, which she repeats. The table of contents is also excessively detailed, reading more like an outline of the book rather than a list of chapters. Still, social workers will likely find the author’s counsel to be entertaining and informative throughout.
A pleasantly informal guide for new and midcareer social workers.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5462-7751-4
Page Count: 254
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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