A highly relatable collection of anecdotes that serves as a valuable crash course on the pitfalls, seductions, and rewards...
A psychoanalyst dissects the raptures and torments of love through a series of case studies.
With 40 years of experience as a psychoanalyst, Safer (Cain's Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret, 2012) has played confidante to innumerable secrets of love, from heartbreak to ecstasy. Building on her variety of experiences in the field, the author compiles the notable stories in this compendium, attempting to illuminate the mysteries of love that have so confounded, fooled, and transfixed humanity for centuries. Among the case studies Safer relates from her professional experience and personal life are tales of subjugation, betrayal, and the incapacity for love. The author even recounts her own story of unrequited love when, as a naïve 19-year-old, she “fell passionately in love with a man that meant far more to me than I did to him” and withheld the details of the affair for nearly 50 years out of shame. But Safer is not solely interested in sexual love. She also relates many stories of friendship, including her first experience of loss during her separation from her roommate and best friend at college. Though the stories of jealously and embitterment are salaciously entertaining, Safer closes the collection with a section on fulfilled love. Perhaps most heartwarming is the chapter on late-life first marriage, which defies typical conventions of love as a young person’s game and serves as an uplifting and optimistic ending to the woes and travails of love lost and regretted. Throughout the author’s many different examples, her analysis is mostly Freudian-based (with additional credit to Heinz Kohut, “the founder of psychoanalytic self psychology”), and her insights are astute. However, since psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor, some may find that her conclusions lack empirical clarity.
A highly relatable collection of anecdotes that serves as a valuable crash course on the pitfalls, seductions, and rewards of love.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05575-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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