I bought this book a while ago, because it looked informative and interesting. (Not to mention that I will be starting high school next year!) I started to read it, and was very glad I had bought it. Of course it tells you all that usual stuff about doing what you want, finding out what you like, and stuff like that, but it also has very practical information. It even has other resources and places you can go for help. I really recommend this book. Read this book, it's worth it.

Susan Abel Lieberman has written a book that should be on the shelf of all high-school students and their parents. The Real High School Handbook is filled with solid information and advice, and colorful examples from the lives of students.In an engaging conversational tone, Lieberman challenges her young readers to take responsibility for their own futures-- and on page after page, she shows them specific ways to do that. It's clear that Lieberman has spent a lot of time time with high school students and knows the ins and outs of the high school scene. She has heard it all from--"it's the teachers fault,"--to "I just can't do it." Her answers to students' familiar laments are good humored, and straightforward. She's almost certain to capture the attention of students complaining about teachers, when she writes,"Just as every batter doesn't face an equally good pitcher--or umpire--every student doesn't get an equally good teacher. Whether a teacher is good or not,'fair'or not, the student, like the batter, is the one being graded on what happens." The Real High School Handbook is a terrific bedside-table book. Students will find themselves turning to it again and again--when it's time to make summer plans, calculate GPA's, apply to college or a job.They'll also find it invaluable when they want encouragement and reassurance. The Real High School handbook is a much needed guide to success for all students!

I got this book because of the enthusiastic review in Robert Fulghum's "From Beginning to End" and it richly deserves his praise. Susan Lieberman felt the need to give her family a richer emotional life, and found that the conventional holidays and customs didn't satisfy in the context of modern American culture.

So for a couple of years she simply asked everyone she met whether they had invented any new family traditions. And she found dozens. She compiled the real experiences of real families -- simple accounts of what worked and what didn't in creating rich, satisfying family circles.

The suggestions are amazingly simple, yet endlessly inventive. There's the family that decided they would all (parents & 3 kids) walk the family dog after supper every night. Regardless of weather, out they go; walking in all sorts of different pairings and groupings depending on who has what on their minds to talk about. Or the "you are special" dinner plate which, hokey as it seems, works: it appears as the supper plate of whoever has a success or a birthday or any other reason to be feted by the rest of the family that day.

Simple ideas, worked out in real life by real people, to make real lives more resonant. This is a superb book that I'll be giving away as a present to at least 3 other families I can think of, next Christmas.