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Rating: 
Summary: excellent learning book
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: excellent learning book
Review: I taught a course using this book as a text. I was very satisfied in how comprehensive the book is (covering many topics and in enough depth). I was surprised so many students also gave excellent feedback on the content. We agreed it helped us to become aware of our own prejudices, what our own thoughts of "normal" were and it also helped us to help our clients by being aware of their contexts. Complete, comprehensive and VERY readable! I highly recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: What Everyone Needs to Know about Families
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: What Everyone Needs to Know about Families
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The authors' agenda overrides all else
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The authors' agenda overrides all else
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Is this a text or a manifesto?
Review: The writers of this book attempt to mask their political agenda as facts needed in order to work in family therapy. Instead of providing insight into the problems and challenges of family therapy the reader is delugued with opinions with are anti-male, anti-marriage, and racist.
Rating:
Summary: Great Comprehensive Text!
Review: This book provides readers with comprehensive, well researched and up-to-date information on the family through all of its stages. It offers thoughtful challenges throughout about how the politics of oppression affect ALL families. I disagree heartily with the above reviewer who suggests the book is anti-men, anti-marriage or racist. Rather, the author supports families of all types and encourages readers to look beyond their own cultural upbringing and consider how a family's life cycle is affected by issues of race, class, wealth, divorce and sexual orientation.
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