I would reccommend this book for anyone in their 20's or 30's especially, anyone who has ever felt alone, anyone who has ever almost wanted their parents to catch them doing something they shouldn't - just so they could talk, and anyone who has ever asked "does God even care that I exist?"
Betty Smartt Carter has my respect and admiration for sharing so courgeously! This book deserves to be read! I wish I was rich enough to stand on a street corner and give copies away! Don't miss it.

This is a book that I would recommend to just about anyone. Not only is Betty Carter down-to-earth, she is incredibly funny! I don't normally laugh out loud while reading, but several times I found myself shaking in my chair trying to contain my laughter.

Her honest account of her own struggles proves that there is hope for all of us.

Now in a completely revised and expanded second edition, Betty Carter's Best Books For Young Adults continues to offer invaluable insights and guidance for directing contemporary young adult readers through the wealth of literature available to them. Library students, staff, and administrators will learn how to crate dynamic reading lists for teens and young adults drawing from more than 1,800 classic and contemporary books; learn more about what teenagers are interested in reading today; identify the books considers "the best" by teen readers themselves; and director young adults toward appropriate adult literature. Best Books For Young Adults is a core reference title for library science collections and "must" reading for any librarian working with adolescent and young adult library patrons.

Connecticut Survival, part of The Survival Series, is a comprehensive guide to dealing with all of the bureaucratic stuff of life, yet it is concisely written. It has all the forms your teenager or young adult will have to fill out sooner or later -- registration to vote, job application, passport, tax forms, and more, so they can become familiar with them in advance. It also has good advice -- like how much money is safe to borrow or how to make a budget. It explains how to open a checking account and balance a check book! That's why I think every high school senior should have this book, or its companion books, New York Survival and California Survival. The books list lots of web sites that are useful for navigating life. I feel better knowing my college freshman can use this guide to help her manage her new independence.

I love it when a book makes me stop in my tracks and think, "Wait a minute, that makes sense. Why haven't I ever thought to look at things that way?"

This book incorporates not only the premise that problems arise within a family system but also within the context of cultural assumptions. Our society values earning and power, thus the Golden Rule (She/he who has the gold, rules). Though each marriage partner has individual problems, these problems arise from the patterns of relating we learn from our parents and our families of origin. Until we understand them, we recreate them in our own marriages. This book, along with David Schnarch's book, Passionate Marriage, will really get your brain churning!

This extraordinary book is about much more than negotiation. It is really about the nature of marriage. Through her successful family therapy practice and her own personal growth, the author has achieved tremendous insights into the assumptions that Americans bring to marriage, how these assumptions can cause problems for us, and how we can rethink our assumptions in order to make our marriages work, or work better.

Carter shows how the traditional model of marriage has not changed fast enough to successfully support the other ways that society has changed. The traditional model is one breadwinner and one homemaker in a heterosexual first marriage. This is how most of us were raised, and perhaps more importantly, it is the model that society, for the most part, is currently set up to support and value. While many young people today intend to share expenses and responsibilities equally with their partners, when we get married, especially if we have children, we tend to unconsciously fall back into thinking according to the traditional model. There's nothing wrong with both partners choosing a traditional marriage; the problem is that many of us do not make fully conscious choices about marriage. Instead, we unwittingly buy into a model that does not in fact (usually) serve either party well.

What's particularly brilliant about the way that Carter explores these issues is that she shows the reader why it matters and how it can change. The book includes useful stories about real people's marriages, and the emphasis is on what was making these people unhappy, what was keeping them from seeing all of their options, how they learned to consider and embrace new options, and whether and how their marriages changed. Because the stories are selected so well and integrated so nicely with the broader exploration of social issues, the book is easy to read and the relatively complex social issues are made very accessible.

The book does not say that money always equals power, but points out that the two are generally equated in American society. It also points out that without autonomy, people do not generally feel equal -- because they really aren't equal in the sense of having the same options. Autonomy--being able to stand on one's own--is so linked with money, not just emotionally, but in reality, that it is important for us to understand the implications of who makes how much money and how the money is shared.

The book also makes it clear that there are two kinds of power, "power over and power to." The book does not advocate that anyone use power over another person, whether that power is in the form of money, affection, or anything else. It does show us why people sometimes do that, and how to think about and deal with people who come from that perspective. It also shows us how people can learn to use the "power to" make themselves happier. Many women are uncomfortable with any type of power, including the power to be happy and even to protect ourselves. This book helps us understand why it is a bad idea to pretend that there are no power issues or power struggles in a relationship, and why it is a good idea to learn more about these dynamics. But its focus is by no means how to win a power struggle. Rather, it shows us how a better understanding of these dynamics can help us negotiate a win-win marriage.

It also, by the way, describes how to negotiate a win-win divorce, with emphasis on how to best support and nurture children during and after divorce.

The book also emphasizes the importance of looking at the family as a system, and shows how our experiences in our families of origin play a shockingly large role in our relationships with our spouses. It includes very helpful examples of how people have reconnected with their "impossible" parents in order to learn more about themselves and the family themes that have shaped their expectations and assumptions (which are often hidden).

In short, this is a book about how to be happier. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn how to be happier in a committed relationship.

A great book for those who want to make changes in their marriage/relationships. The main issue that she puts forth is that money=power. That equation changes the way that people communicate and negotiate in relationship. Examples abound as well as helpful ways to boost your negotiating power.(the main one being - get and keep a job even if its only part time!) This book could change alot of relationships for the better.

I initially decided to read this book because I had heard mention of its historical importance in the field of young adult work. Imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to find that Margaret Edwards was a dynamic, funny writer whose issues in the sixties regarding the state of young adult services has numerous parallels in today's world of teen services! While the text is certainly dated in terms of language and the books discussed, the refreshing attitude of Edwards can still be seen in many public libraries all over the country. This is a great read, intrinsically and historically, and I think many librarians will say, "How little has changed!" Let's hope we all work to further the work that Edwards began.

I used this book, which came highly recommended, to teach a graduate-level course in Family Therapy. At first glance it seemed like a useful text, having earned a great deal of praise from other professors. However, the book was a disappointment to both myself and my students.

While I would not go so far as to say that the book contained no useful information, much of the book's potential utility was overshadowed by the authors' transparent political agenda. An example of good clinical advice provided by the authors was to ask wealthy families, in an initial interview, how they are using their funds to help the poor. Coming across with this overtly judgmental and clinically irrelevant question in the first interview is clearly not the way to win over a troubled family.

When studying the book, it was often possible to forget that families seeking therapy may actually have troubles of their own. The articles in the book focused largely on sociopolitical issues. Obviously, one cannot discount the influence of the larger context; however, struggles with gender unfairness in the workplace are rarely the presenting problem which drives an entire family into a therapist's office. Perhaps it was for this reason that focused, practical clinical advice for the budding clinician was nearly absent from many of the articles.

Pragmatics aside, the book was also lacking in terms of scholarship. A variety of grand claims were made by various authors with limited citations to support these claims. Despite the reference lists at the end of each chapter, I found it jarring to read several consecutive paragraphs without footnotes describing, for example, the "typical" presentation of clients from different cultural groups. There was also a surprising tendency on the part of some authors to make detailed references to their personal lives in the article. While anecdotes can certainly be illustrative, they should not serve as the basis of an article.

Overall, I was very disappointed in this book and would not assign it again. While there was some useful information embedded in a few of the articles, on the whole this book attests to the need to keep textbooks agenda-free.

I think this may be the best book I've read on the family life cycle events we are told to anticipate (marriage, motherhood, launching of children, aging) as well as the unexpected difficulties life plunks down in our path. It is so clearly written that I recommend it not only to family therapists, but also to just plain folks who want to learn more about how families work. It's rich, comprehensive, pioneering, bold,inclusive and very helpful.

As a psychology intern who has worked with families for teh last year, I have found this book to be extremely helpful in understanding the families that I work with. It has helped me keep their life cycles in perspective, and has allowed me to understand the not-so-conventional families. We used this book in class, and I have been surprised at the amount of times I have turned to it since. In my quest to do the best job possible, I have read many other books on family therapy. This book was extremely valuable and helpful to me, and offers realistic content that is not found in most other books.

I don't mean to be mean, but this book gave me no new information about ADD. It is the same info from everything else that I have read.

Those of you who have read other books by Barkley have already read this one. It is the same thing over and over and over again. Don't waste your money.

My main reason for writing is to point out that the earlier reviewer who criticized Barkley for the passage about the 3 Little Pigs completely misunderstood the point Barkley was trying to make. Barkley was not saying that he thought that ADHD people deserved what they got; he was saying that some people who misunderstood what ADHD was all about might believe that ADHD people deserved what they got. The reviewer did not read Barkley carefully.

As a young family therapy student, I was very taken with this book because it clearly and consistently applies family therapy approaches (although mostly the structural, modernist kinds) through a feminist lens. The case studies were very helpful, especially the transcripts which helped me to envision what therapeutic dialogue might sound like.

However, some years have now passed, and a re-read of this book left me frustrated and irritated. The authors seem to have a very limited perspective on family gender roles, centered around a white, middle-class, heterosexist perspective. Many times authors speak in generalities about what "mothers and daughters" or "fathers and daughters" do in their relationships with one another, and I find myself writing notes in the margin: "says who?" "Not in my family!" etc.

This book is helpful for students if taken with a grain of salt and presented by an instructor versed in more postmodern techniques and multicultural critiques.