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What books are you reading?
Dormouse:
Last week I finished The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen. It was a surprisingly exciting account for a history book with a substantial proportion of its pages with footnotes and references. Many references drawn from contemporary eye witness accounts.
What books are you reading?
I read it because it was a pivotal (long) moment in the history of Europe at the transition between the mediaeval and modern ages (1565), and because I'd recently become aware of how little I knew of the detail of Italian history in the post-Roman and mediaeval periods. This was drawn to my attention when I read Tim Powers' The Drawing of the Dark, which I read a few months ago. This brilliant fantasy was based on the Siege of Vienna in 1529 - another successful resistance to an Ottoman attack. Tim Powers was known for using contemporaneous evidence and recorded history to provide a basis for his fantasy fiction. I was surprised that it had not been extended into a series (everything had been set up for it), but had not realised that it had been first published in 1979 before series were the accepted way for authors to make money.
What books are you reading?
Dormouse:
Dr. Gottman has spent decades studying relationships and is the foremost expert on them.-Deozaan (June 02, 2018, 10:27 AM)
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Hesitate to weigh in here, but I think it is an exaggeration to call John Gottman the foremost expert on relationships. Or an academic. He was a clinical academic, which is quite a different thing. His research and statistical approaches were somewhat problematic, although that isn't unusual in clinically oriented research. If you want an academic view, you could try one of the books by Steve Duck (though his interests have widened in recent years).
Steve has written or edited 60 books on relationships and other matters and was the founder and, for the first 15 years, the Editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. His book Meaningful Relationships: Talking, Sense, and Relating won the G. R. Miller Book Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association. Steve co-founded a series of international conferences on personal relationships. - Excerpt from Amazon
Disclosure - I knew him personally some years ago (acquaintance rather than friend).
PS I'm not recommending the books, (a) because I probably haven't read the ones you'd consider and (b) because a book by a pure academic is rarely what people are looking for when they are looking for books on relationships.
IainB:
@tomos:
1. Name of the textbook: Sorry, but I don't recall it. It wasn't mine. I had borrowed it from someone or a local library. I did a quick duckgo search just now and came up with a l-o-n-g list of likely books on the subject of TA. One that looked similar to what I recalled was: Ta Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis. (Second Edition) Ian Stewart, Vann Joines
The reviews for that on Amazon mention the breakdown of the PAC ego states into subgroups (e.g., Adapted Child) - and that (the subgroups) was a new thing to me at the time and was one of the reasons I was reading the book (to learn from it). I expect there are lots of books on TA, but this one looked like it could be useful. The thing to focus on would probably be not so much the title as the content - i.e., coverage and understanding of the modern, newer theoretical aspects of TA and how they might be applied in practice (psychotherapy).
2. Qualities of my post: The first part may have been overstated in its suggestions, as you say, but I don't know. I just try my best and was in a bit of a hurry as I was about to go out to a farmers' market.
The second part was something of an afterthought when I realised that I had effectively referred someone to a book on the subject, but it was done inadvertently. At the time, it struck me as quite an extraordinary coincidence that Anne was describing her real-life script-acting, almost exactly as it was described theoretically in the book that I had been reading.
As for recommending such a book to someone, well, I'm not so sure.
These sorts of books can be quite challenging to the ego as they generally indicate (to be of any use for self-help) the need for a more open mind and a willingness to change oneself and, as J.K. Galbraith so adroitly put it:
“Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.”
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That is, recommending therapy - rather than a book - might be more likely to produce a positive/beneficial result for the individual concerned. Egos can be both terrible and pretty fragile things.
rgdot:
I guess a whole other topic as far as DC goes :tellme:
What books are you reading?
wraith808:
That is, recommending therapy - rather than a book - might be more likely to produce a positive/beneficial result for the individual concerned.
-IainB (June 03, 2018, 05:53 AM)
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If my statement above doesn't indicate this well enough, let it be known that I agree with that statement.
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