Julia

This book was fine, and DBT is obviously an enourmously effective therapy. I just wish that Linehan had put “manual” somewhere in the title, so I wouldn't have held out hope for so long that it would suddenly turn more fascinating than instructive (I probably unfairly judge fascination level by amount of clinical examples). She does, however, excel at writing clearly and without jargon.

If you know nothing about adolescents who commit sexual offenses, but were interested in learning more, this would be a good place to start. Adolescent sexual offending is the topic of my dissertation, so I found myself noting where this book (from 2006) is now a touch out-of-date with regard to research, but DiCataldo certainly created an admirable and still-current overview of the many ethical issues surrounding how we think about and intervene with adolescents who have offended. I think a particular strength is his ability to draw connections between mental health treatment issues and the legal history of how such adolescents are adjudicated, which are two areas not often integrated (I think largely related to the biases of researchers–psychologists tend to have a psychological angle, and legal scholars tend to have a legal one). Serious miscarriages of justice have occurred with disturbing frequency in this population, and I think general public conception of JSOs tends more toward fiction than fact, so anyone interested in child welfare might appreciate this thoughtful and thorough review of the topic.

This is a beautiful, beautiful book, with a very interesting backstory. Sorensen (born in 1912) was raised LDS in rural Utah, but went on to travel the world with her second husband (Evelyn Waugh's brother), becoming a Guggenheim-fellowship-winning writer in her own right. The novel meanders through the big and heavy themes of religion, culture, infidelity, and parenting from the perspective of a thoughtful yet imperfect heroine coming to terms with the world she grew up in, fled from, and then attempts to come to terms with. I feel quite grateful to have had this recommended to me by a dear friend, as I'm unsure I would have stumbled across it otherwise.

One of the most interesting things about the book is how Sorensen's exquisite descriptions of Utah still resonate:

“Sometimes, away, one forgot the austerity of this country and its rocky slopes. One remembered only blue of heights melting at skyline, receiving first snow while summer was still hot in the valleys. One forgot the semidesert alkali-ridden outskirts of irrigated villages, sparse brush-and-sunflower-covered slopes, spraying crickets at every step. One forgot that scrub cedar looked ragged and twisted like trees by the sea deformed by constant wind. One forgot summer-dry creek beds, ravines empty but for gray rocks, and remembered only water running. One remembered the beauty of sheep and lambs and forgot the deep dust they left, and manure, and the stiff stripped stalks of nettle and wild clover. Today Kate thought of how quickly, given war or devastation of any kind, this country would be wild again. The villages were, from above, literally cries in a wilderness.”

No problem with this in terms of content(the title is a smidge misleading, but it's basically the Dialectical Behavior Therapy [DBT] skills manual). I love how Linehan's approach is really grounded in Eastern philosophy, with the kind of thorough explanation of techniques that I think only really comes from having a personal practice as well. I like therapists who practice what they preach :)

That said, I found the layout to be GAWDAWFUL. Seriously, so much great content–couldn't some editor somewhere have whipped it into prettier, easier to read shape?

I suspect that I liked this book because I took it with a rather large grain of salt (npi). Eisenstein sometimes careens rather quickly from sensible (Why yes, raw vegan diets make plenty of sense for hermits with minimal physical activity–oh, you say you live in the world? With people? And a job? Perhaps rethink the celery...) to odd (I understood his logic around the point, but I think he's probably the first person ever to claim that tea is bad for you, and I just can't get on board with that idea). He's best when he talks about the actual practice of the yoga of eating–eat slowly enough to be able to actually taste your food, and trust that your sense of taste can guide you quite effectively towards what you want and need and away from what you don't. At any rate, the book is pleasantly short enough that you can avoid actually overdosing on the woo-woo; perhaps the best testament I can make to his good ideas is that writing this review has alerted me to the fact that I'm thirsty.

Useful for things other than the “Hidden Cancun.” Fodor's does a good job with normal guide book type stuff (prices, hours, blah de blah), and I definitely used the maps in here the most, but I much prefer the cultural sections of other guide books. If you never read those, this would be a fine all-purpose resource. Good index.

In all honesty, I read this after reading a certain Oatmeal comic (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla). Here, Samantha Hunt gives Tesla a beautiful introduction, and Tesla himself turns out to be as kooky as one would hope such a prolific scientist and inventor would be, with just enough narcissism to warrant the occasional eyeroll. I can't say I understand the Tesla coil any better now than I did before, or anything useful like that, but Tesla was funny in addition to being a genius, and I'm glad to have read some of his own stuff directly.

Alice Munro might not think of herself as a feminist author (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-dear-life-an-interview-with-alice-munro), but she sure reads like one, in the best possible way. I also sometimes struggle with collections of short stories - if a novel's theme is like hitting a big gong and letting the reverberations ripple out into the air over the course of the book, sometimes a collection of short stories feels to me like someone keeps hitting a smaller gong over and over again. I did not have this struggle with Munro, despite my previous experience of her being restricted to single stories at a time in The New Yorker. I don't think I could ever get tired of what she has to say, and the thematic consistencies across her stories feel like meaningfully different variations on answers to her larger questions.

Well...in the case of New Mexican history, truth is typically stranger than fiction. My uncle, who lived in and loved Albuquerque for roughly a decade, mailed this to me shortly after my arrival. Dornan has a knack for telling fascinating historical vignettes, so this is an easy and pleasant book to read in bits. It covers all the bases of NM's unique confluence of cultures (e.g., Native, Hispanic, and Anglo) with political intrigue, Catholic imperialism, cowboys, and accusations of witchcraft. Perhaps best summed up by this quote from one of the people unfortunate enough to try to govern an area of the worldwhere people of all backgrounds believe firmly in their own independence:

“Poor New Mexico! So far from heaven, so close to Texas!”
–Manuel Armijo, Mexican governor of the territory of Nuevo México, 1841

When people ask me for a good book on sex, this is always the one I point them to. Witty, informative, and quite cheeky.

During my first year of grad school, we had this awesome object relations therapist who taught a year-long course on psychotherapy to our little cohort - we talked about everything from nonspecific factors to existential therapy. Jim recommended this book at the end of the year, but I just got around to reading it (7 years later...oops). I'm really glad I've kept it & carted it along on two big moves. McWilliams is a treasure. She is a tremendously gifted writer, who is so humorous and compassionate about the art of therapy (both the art of giving and of receiving!) that I would bet a great deal of money that she is also a tremendously gifted therapist. Psychodynamic isn't my home orientation, but a lot of it speaks to me, and I think this is a “must read” for all clinicians.

A beautiful quote:
“Analytic therapy has, as Lichtenberg (1998), and others have emphasized, a kind of self-righting mechanism that iterates towards authenticity” (p. 42, on faith in therapy).

A quote that made me laugh outloud in self-recognition:
“Like many therapists, I am an unregenerate voyeur: I love to witness what is private, hidden, concealed from public view. I read People magazine. I gossip. I savor the juicy anecdote. I thought, when I began my training as a therapist, that this lamentable yet robust part of my personality would be deeply nourished by this work. I regret to report that feasts for one's voyeurism lose most of their spice when one cannot share them with others” (p. 264-265, on occupational hazards).

I love it when poets write prose. Karr's language is just so, so good. This was also interesting to read just after George Sanders' Tenth of December, which I was so ambivalent about because of its darkness. Cherry is, if anything, darker, because the things Karr experienced and bore witness to are real, but I felt uplifted that a mind like hers can emerge from an adolescence like that and live to tell the tale so evocatively.

I pulled this off the shelf at the clinic I now work in - it's a classic for a reason. Satir wrote this for parents, and I cannot think of descriptions that are more clear, concise, and compassionate than Satir's as she explored communication, self-esteem, and the complex dynamics of family systems. I was going to write that my one quibble is that it's now outdated - a fair amount of heteronormative assumptions, etc. - except that once you get to the last chapter, Satir pointed to divorce, cohabitation and child-rearing without marriage, same-sex relationships, and polyamory and said, “What if all the practices that are now going on, which we have labelled as morally bad, were instead really evidence of the great variations in human beings?” In 1972! Way to preach, lady, and be WAY on the right side of history! Threaded throughout the book is the compelling idea that, in whatever form they take, families are how people are made, and the fate of the species thus rests on how supportive families are, and how supported they are, as well.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is my primary modality for treating folks in individual therapy, and the kind of couples therapy I do (Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy) has a high degree of overlap with ACT. I was excited to read an explicitly ACT-oriented self-help approach for couples, and was impressed with Harris' book. It's a good length, written accessibly without being cheesy, and has a lot of wisdom. I think some people chafe against the idea of acceptance (e.g., “I just have to accept what I don't like about my partner???”), but the heart of the book (and ACT more broadly) is about values. So, yeah...if staying in your relationship is more important to you than your dislikes, you are going to have to figure out a way to may it work (and Harris provides lots of detail about how to do that mindfully). That's not complacence; that's prioritizing one of your own values above another. But we all get to choose. Anyway, I've used parts of it with patients already, and would recommend it both professionally and personally to most folks.

This book is a really wonderful synthesis of broad-but-accurate strokes of neuroscience and the humanistic aspects of mindfulness. For me, the tripping point was that even though Siegel has a sense of humor about his acronyms, there were still too many for them to be useful for me, and I often found the graphics often forgettably simple for complex ideas where more detailed graphics (especially neuroanatomical ones) might have actually helped. I'll have to read more Siegel, as I gather some of his books more directly discuss therapeutic technique. Overall, I'm glad I read it, I'm sure I'll return to it, but it was one of those books you can tell was written by a brilliant person whose brilliance didn't always translate successfully onto the page in this particular endeavor.

Ugh. I picked this up from a Little Free Library in my neighborhood during a time when I needed a quick distraction. This was my first Danielle Steel novel, and it was distractingly bad, so mission accomplished, I guess. I'm not just being snarky about bestselling authors; if this novel is representative of Steel's work, several dozen of them are worth one by Mary Higgins Clark, which used to be some of my favorite beach reads. The plot was a foregone conclusion, and the characters were one-note and boring. In fairness to Steel, however, this is a particularly difficult climate in which to attempt to swallow her approach to gender (e.g., “She looked up at him again and for a mad moment she wanted to fold herself into his arms, to feel the safety she had once felt, protected by a man.”), so that's a big part of what I found so noxious. Lesson learned!

I'm waffling between 3 and 4 stars on this dense little book. I've used pieces of it with patients for a long time, but only recently finished the whole thing with a patient. I think the needle the authors deftly thread is not shying away from the mindfulness-based and emotion-oriented aspects of ACT that angry people can easily dismiss as “touchy-feely,” while also presenting that material in a simple, matter-of-fact way. They assume without being judgmental that the person reading the book is doing so because their anger is no longer “working” for them. Perhaps I wish aspects of committed, values-based action was added earlier? In summary: not a game-changer, but a solid addition to any ACT practitioner's library.

I stole this book from my mother, who is also very partial to it. I find it a little too oriented to East Coast gardening, which is also arguably fair, given Druse's location, but it does limit its applicability to me to some degree. On the other hand, he's very knowledgeable about North American native plants generally, and the specific details on plants is quite good. The book also gives fairly good detail on what's in the gorgeous photos, but there are one or two gardens photographed here without as much description in their details as I would like. So...very beautiful, definitely glad to have read it, but depending on your practical needs, not a 5-star experience for everyone.

I adore this book. Anyone who has ever talked to me in person about gardening can tell you how much I abhor America's slavish devotion to grass, so this book is just a feast for my eyes and soul. Hadden does a great job of finding very diverse examples of no-mow yards, both in terms of geography and appearance, and really mixes good practical advice in with the inspiration. I still have way more grass than I'd like, but have been using this as a reference book to get the yard headed in the right direction.

Did you know that during the last ice age, a glacial lake in Montana drained in a series of cataclysmic floods that unleashed a torrent of water (the largest had 13 times the flow of the Amazon) all the way to the Pacific? True story. I'm not sure how interesting this book would be if you haven't seen the wild, wild landscape of central Washington (look at the Google images for “dry falls washington” to get an idea of the scarred landscape the floods left behind), but if you have, it's a nice meld of geology, biography, and a bit of scientific history. Bretz was the geologist who traversed much of this landscape on foot, and was rewarded for his hard work, careful observations, and good hypothesizing with criticism and contempt from his peers. The personal narrative drags a bit at times (I'll be honest - I was reading this for the flood details, which I found astounding), but Soennichsen has a friendly, conversational tone, and I'm glad he shed light on how this particular bit of our geological history was discovered.

This is a professional read. I'm 4/5ths of the way through the VA training in providing CBCT-PTSD (followed by 6 months of supervision & consultation calls to make sure I'm delivering it adherently), and I have to say, I'm really impressed. This therapy is designed for close dyads - could be romantic partners, but also family members or even close friends - in which one partner has PTSD, and the model is really parsimonious with a good theoretical background. It has a greater emphasis on cognitive flexibility versus cognitive restructuring than some trauma-focused therapy (i.e., it has clear roots in but also evolution beyond Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD, which I really appreciate as an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy practitioner), and as the subtitle suggests, does a great job harnessing the power of interpersonal interactions to boost treatment efficacy. Only giving 4 out of 5 stars because I've yet to do this therapy, but I'm excited to start.

I can't remember when I read this...sometime last year, I think. This book hasn't altered my clinical work dramatically, I would say, since the connections between ACT and trauma in my mind were already pretty clear, but it's a nice workbook for patients and I do use it regularly. I wish there was a little more data on ACT for trauma, but I think it'll trickle in over time. The main thing I wish the author attended to with a bit more care is how to do mindfulness-based work with people who really struggle with hyperarousal and/or dissociation.

I think my rating for this book will go up over time. It's a really great, comprehensive resource. One of my favorite parts is how, in the “year at a glance” reviews of how to plan, prepare, and implement, the authors always encourage you to grab a warm cup of coffee before sitting down to daydream about spring in the middle of a northwest winter. I wish they were a little more focused on native plants, but I'm not super doctrinaire about that in my own garden, so who am I to talk?

A dear friend gifted me this book. My star rating might be a bit misleading - for another anchor, I liked it enough that I plan to buy & read the other two books in the trilogy. My two favorite things about the book are both interesting philosophical issues: first, what does it mean to be human (deftly explored from many compelling angles by a protagonist who is not seen as human by the world she inhabits); and second, what is it with our obsession with gendering? The protagonist's primary language doesn't use gendered pronouns, and as someone who works really hard to embrace gender fluidity both professionally and in my personal life, it was very instructive to notice my own desire to “know” the gender of characters all described as “she,” and then reflect on why that felt important for me to know. I think it's a great example of a way of raising a complex and important issue in a novel that never felt didactic, but more truly experiential. Plot-wise, I think Leckie introduced but then didn't fully explore spiritual/existential issues as effectively as she could have, and there were times in the first half when the timeline & characters were a little harder for me to follow than I normally find sci-fi in a way that felt accidental, not intentional. Overall, though, I enjoyed this, and want to find out what the narrator does next in what promises to be a sequel full of moral ambiguity.

I love doing ACT. I find it tremendously powerful. As with the workbook, I wish that the brilliant, brilliant Steven Hayes were a bit more concise.