This was a great book. Reading this was great.

Susan Vaughan has written a wonderful love story full of suspense and excitement. From the tantalizing first sentence to the heart-warming conclusion, this book sparkles with originality and sensuality. Dangerous Attraction demands a sequel. Here's hoping Ms. Vaughan's fans don't have to wait too long.

Susan Vaughan has written an intricate tale full of suspense, surprises, and the healing power of love. The emotional dilemma of her hero and heroine kept me glued to the pages. The wonderfully descrptive passages brought the Maine landscape to vivid life. I'm looking forward to more from the bright new star!

This cookbook provides a wonderful opportunity to recreate in your own home some of the delicious dishes you've enjoyed in the restaurant. I loved the "basics" features whether it be aioli, roasting garlic or making variations of marinara sauces. The recipes are very easy to follow and do not have exotic ingredients. They are reminiscent of being in Italy and enjoying wholesome, delicious foods. All you need is lots of wine and good friends to enjoy the food.

For anyone who has frequented Kuleto's restaurant on Union Square in San Francisco, this book is a MUST!! For those of you who haven't yet gotten there BUY THIS BOOK!! Full of excellent unique menues right out of the restaurant. Make their famous lamb sausage recipe and then follow their recipe to make the sausage with penne, chard and ricotta. The restaurant serves a fantastic appetiser of grilled radichio wrapped in pancetta (with a pesto ceasar dressing) that will knock your socks off - the recipe is in here and I actually drew applause at a dinner party after serving it! Try their unusual dishes like Roast Duck with Dried Cherries and Grappa, Grilled Chicken with Tuscan Bread Salad, or Salmon with Red Wine-Olive Butter...then try their standards like Eggplant Risotto or Braised Veal Shanks, or any of their great pastas.

If you love great food, you will love this book. The recipes are well written and, unlike so many other books from famous restaurants, it actually duplicates their original meals!

This "how-to" book exceeds expectations. I bought it as a guide to Viagra but I was surprised to find how funny and insightful it was. It covers topics such as how impotence develops and what other treatments are available, as well as the latest on Viagra for women. It's the complete guide that will get you started or let you consider your options. What's surprising is how fun it is to read and how much it makes you relax and laugh a bit! As a psychiatrist, the author is also interested in more than just mechanics...fantasy and psychology and relationships get fair play.

With the recent Andrea Yates story being in the media, I couldn't help but think back on the Susan Smith story and recently read this book. It was an emotional book to read. I can remember so well watching Susan Smith on TV in 1994 and at first believing her story, but then I started doubting her. When she finally confessed, I was horrified for Michael and Alex Smith. The thought of two little ones dying in the cold water alone and crying for their mother, who put them there, is almost too much to bear. I feel such sympathy for David Smith. The story of his marriage is difficult to read at times ... the games that David and Susan played were just ridiculous, and both of them were unfaithful in their marriage. They were really two children playing at being married, I think ... they were very young when Susan got pregnant with Michael and had to get married. At Susan's trial, a lot about her life came out ... her father's suicide, abuse by her stepfather, a mother that didn't protect her, depression and earlier suicide attempts. The girl is clearly mentally ill. Now I've heard that two prison guards have been fired for having sex with her; the discovery was made when Susan visited the prison infirmary and was found to have a veneral disease. It is a very sad situation for both families of Michael and Alex Smith, and I know that both families miss those little boys every day. The other night I saw David Smith on CNN. He cried when he talked about Michael and Alex and said he will never forget them. He is happily remarried and has a new baby girl, and said that when she was born, he promised her he wouldn't be afraid to love her. I was very touched by that and hope he will find happiness and peace in his new life. I also hope that Susan Smith and her family will find forgiveness and peace, too.

Susan Smith is the cruellest person I have ever read about. She drove her car into a lake with her two infant sons strapped trustingly in the backseat, then stood on the shore and watched it sink to the murky bottom. She fabricated a story about an alleged carjacker to disguise her sole culpability in this crime. She shed crocodile tears for her estranged husband, her family, friends, the police, the media, and the world, while her murderous secret remained locked inside her noxious heart. She sentenced her boys to death and David to a life of grief. She sits today in prison. She will never on this earth suffer the consequences of what she did.

I started crying two pages into this book, and the tears flowed throughout every aching page. David's pain and suffering is so tragically transmitted to readers that we can almost touch it. But only almost. It is so agonising, so raw, so heartrending, and so horrific, that if Susan Smith were in a room with me I would scream "Why?" repeatedly while pounding her body with my fists!

As I write this, there is a lump in my throat, my jaw is clenched, and the tears are welling up. It is instinctive; I simply can't help myself. I will never forget this story, this book, David, or beautiful and innocent little Michael and Alex. Nor should anyone else. Forgetting them would be like forgetting what it means to be human.

This was such a sad bad. Like David Smith said, "Remember who are the true victims in all this, Miicheal and Alex, NOT Susan Smith! It was a good and fast reading and I a book is so much better when it's write by a person who the story concern them and not from a famous writer, is even better when the writer is not a writer, so from people who said this book is good but the editing is bad, I don't see what is bad, I thought the book was very good and it comming from the heart and soul to who that real story had happen, you can feel his pain! Everybody was saying how Susan was too good for David, my God it was the other way around, David was too good for Susan. Susan was picture as like a hot, sexy girl, sorry to me she look like a ordinary house wife and kinda chubby, she come from the South right? Yeah she do look like redneck, the way she dress and wear her hair are out of fashion even in 90th, well I am out of context here but can't help saying that to me see doesn't look hot stuff and one of the book with her glasses and her hair pine up she look like a geek! Like David Smith said, the two persons who love her the most, (their kids), she had killed them, how can a mother do this to her own children and said she love them? Why David Smith want so much the death penalty for Susan, if she got a soul she suffer much more in prison, well if she got one. She seem only to think for herself and feel pity for herself. Killing her children because she was in love with a guy that didn't want a family allready made, so she killed her kids and to have the pity of the man she love she make a a big lie that a man took over her car and push her out put kept the kids. Did she really think she could live with the rest of her life with that story and have back the man she love? She was stupid, he was also having other affair and like I said Susan is no hot thing, why he would go with her? Still a part of me pity her, if she really was having depression it can make you do stupid things, yeah maybe she was really insane!

This book has three major flaws that make it untrustworthy:

(1) Dr. Vaughan has chosen to review only a select subset of the research on attitudes and adjustment. She proves that optimism is a good thing (and that we ought to aim for it) by reviewing only those studies that say that. As several other reviewers of this book have pointed out, the research is much more complex than that.

However, contra some other reviers, you cannot come to a correct view simply by reading Dr. Vaughan, then by reading persons of an opposite opinion, because x + (-x) = 0. If the people saying (-x) have correctly analyzed the entire body of literature, while x is based on a very selective reading of a subset of research, "balancing" (-x) with x produces error, not balance. You come to a correct view by seeing what an accurate meta-analysis of the research actually says. It may say (-x).

(2) Dr. Vaughan's manner of applying scientific findings to clinical or real-life situations boggles the mind. Dr. Vaughan leaps grandly from studies to "and so we know" this, that, or the other about clinical or real life situations. It just ain't so.

In scientific studies, we try to limit carefully the characteristics of our sample and the variables at work. Every semi-competent scientist knows that life is not like that. Hence, we do not extrapolate directly to real life-because real life contains all sorts of variables not included in our study, and people with all sorts of characteristics that we carefully excluded from our sample.

To get from science to real life requires careful, ever-widening circles of investigation, in which we add a variable or two, or a trait or two, at a time, carefully extending the scope of our hypothesis outward. Nearly always, this process of widening the circle of investigation results in changing the hypothesis-another reason that extrapolating wildly cannot claim to be "science."

(3) Finally, Dr. Vaughan has also forgotten the basic principle that science, by the nature of the case, cannot tell us how we ought to be. It can, at best, tell us how things are and how they work, and inform us of the respective outcomes of different actions. Science does not, and cannot, show that optimism (or pessimism) is "better" than any other attitude.

Consider an analogy: Suppose someone produced a study showing (a) that men are happier when women are submissive and deferential than when women assert themselves as equals, and (b) those women who accept that state of affairs have fewer stress-related diseases than those who do not. (Such a study would not be difficult to produce even today, and a few decades ago would have been easy to replicate over and over and over again.) Would we then conclude that "science" had "shown" that male dominance is to be preferred? Of course not.

The research on positive illusions raises far more questions than it answers, and to pretend otherwise is simply-well, I guess it's a positive illusion, and a good illustration of why this approach should be regarded warily.

Whether one is "Harvard-trained" or a bubba from the boonies, the principles of science remain the same, and Dr. Vaughan's book violates those principles.

The key to Dr. Vaughan's or anyone else's understanding of optimism and pessimism is not: 'Which is better for human beings?' -- It is "Do optimistic strategies work well for some people, but pessimistic strategies work better for other people?" And indeed, psychological research indicates that for 40-50% of Americans, optimism is adaptive, but also that optimism is an unsuccessful, maladaptive, and counterproductive strategy for at least 33%. For that group of 33% + the strategy that works far better than "don't worry, be happy" optimism is 'constructive-defensive' pessimism. It is precisely because individuals differ so profoundly that 'positive psychology' is too one-sided and too 'one-size-fits-all' to be fully valid, and that is why we need the corrective found in the books on optimism and pessimism edited by Ed Chang.

So think individually about the previous reviewer suggestion: "contra some other reviers, you cannot come to a correct view simply by reading Dr. Vaughan, then by reading persons of an opposite opinion, because x + (-x) = 0. If the people saying (-x) have correctly analyzed the entire body of literature, while x is based on a very selective reading of a subset of research, "balancing" (-x) with x produces error, not balance." It is the compelling reality of individual differences in personality that matters = X works for you, (-X) works for me, Y works for my friend, Z works for your friend. So constructive pessimism fits some of us, but no single strategy fits all of us !!

Vaughan is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and researcher who can write for the public. In my coaching practice, I sometimes have to grapple with another person's innate and deeply-grounded pessimism and this book gave me ammunition. I do believe that optimism can be learned and in my efforts to extend my own and other people's optimism in the face of some bad-to-worse onslaughts from life, this book has been of immeasurable help. From the amygdala to dream analysis, Vaughan makes it all almost deceptively simple. I doubt that many can "do it" as well as she can, but learning about changing one's level of optimism -- in fact just knowing that we can -- is a great first step! This book gave me real information I can put into practice.

I became aware of Dr. Reker's conservative outlook by statements such as, sex before marriage is illegal in South Carolina, so Susan Smith was breaking the law. He also describes things subjectively, as in, "tawdry sexual exploits". As the book continues, he brings in religion more and more. The last 1/4 of the book is sheer preaching. It is a sermon. He talks about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins... I felt decieved by the fact that the title and cover of the book did not say that it is written with a Christian perspective. An apt title would be, "The Christian Interpretation of the Susan Smith Case." If that's what you want, buy the book. If not, look elsewhere.

The book's best feature was its clear description of how past experiences can help shape a person's future actions and reactions to situations. The book also asks the reader many important questions in order to facilitate thought. Complex behavorial concepts related to Susan Smith's life were made exceptionally clear. This book was so good I read it in one evening! I wish more pictures of Miss Smith were included.

Dr. Rekers did a wonderful job on this book. I would Recommend it to anyone. It helped me under stand Ms. Smith in much more detail. Thank you George fo helping the world understand Smith better! You should write some more novels! It was definetly worth 5 stars on a scale from 1-10 it an eleven!! READ THIS BOOK!!

This book is "science" in about the same sense that a car ad is an engineering text.

If Dr. Vaughan actually believes what she says here, Harvard ought to take back her degree. My freshman students know more about scientific method than this.

BTW, I am a strong believer in "the talking cure," but this book is no defense that any intellectually honest, aware person would ever recommend to anyone. I am just appalled. Beyond appalled.

One of the defining ways in which we might discriminate the sane from the truly deluded would be to determine whether or not the subject realizes that what he or she has written is silly irrational nonsense. Lewis Carrol was tongue-in-cheek aware that much of what he wrote was irrational nonsense; he wrote that silliness on purpose to entertain us. Dr. Susan Vaughan, on the other hand, does not have her tongue in her cheek when she insists in The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy that the "talking cure" she practices is "microsurgery of the mind," "neurosurgery"-not metaphorically, mind you-but literally. And she would have us believe that these 200 plus pages about her "talking cure" actually constitute genuine science rather than delusional silliness.

It would be a VERY short list of her colleague neurosurgeons and scientists at Columbia-or of any neurosurgeons or scientists from anywhere this side of the looking glass-who'd sign on to a statement that they agree that her "talking cure" therapy is real neurosurgery, or real neuroscience, or anything remotely like any kind of science, or for that matter, anything remotely like careful rational thinking.

Some 2500 years ago the Greeks reallized that it could be of some utility to construct a kind of knowing called "logos" distinct from "mythos, " and a unique mode of constructing knowledge was set in motion. Authentic science is differentiated from other kinds of thinking by a rigorous, unrelenting attention to this distinction. Novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, storytellers, shamans, theologians, astrologers, schizophrenics, used car salesmen, creationists, politicians, criminal defense lawyers, alien abductees, young children, and "talking cure" apologists routinely ignore any such distinction.

Susan Vaugh has written a wonderful overview of the inner workings of psychotherapy. Thanks to neural plasticity, psychotherapy can, and, if successful, does change neural pathways and brain structure. Support for this may be found in the way dreams change in the course of successful psychotherapy. During REM sleep, the reticular formation is activated and, as neurons from that area are fired, habitual story themes are creanked out that reflect a client's Core Conflict (Luborsky). As successful psychotherapy progresses, dreams change; i.e., the Core Conflict changes, which in turn indicates that the neurons fired from the reticular formation are being fired in a different way, with different pathways and patterns.