Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness
In this age of do-it-yourself health care (heck, if the doctor only sees you for 10 minutes each visit, what other options are there?), Change Your Brain, Change Your Life fits in perfectly. Filled with “brain prescriptions” (among them cognitive exercises and nutritional advice) that are geared toward readers who’ve experienced anxiety, depression, impulsiveness, excessive anger or worry, and obsessive behavior, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life milks the mind-body connection for all it’s worth.

Written by a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has also authored a book on attention deficit disorder, Change Your Brain contains dozens of brain scans of patients with various neurological problems, from caffeine, nicotine, and heroin addiction to manic-depression to epilepsy. These scans, often showing large gaps in neurological activity or areas of extreme overactivity, are downright frightening to look at, and Dr. Amen should know better than to resort to such scare tactics. But he should also be commended for advocating natural remedies, including deep breathing, guided imagery, meditation, self-hypnosis, and biofeedback for treating disorders that are so frequently dealt with by prescription only.

Author: Daniel G. Amen
Paperback:  352 pages
Company: Three Rivers Press  (1999-12-31) (1999-12-31)
ISBN: 0812929985
List Price: $15.00
Amazon Price: $8.02
Used Price: $7.49

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life
Remember the phrase “question authority”? Loving What Is is a workbook on questioning authority–but in this case, what is in question is the authority of our own fundamental beliefs about our relationships.

Known simply as “The Work,” Byron Katie’s methods are clean and straightforward. The basis is a series of four questions addressed to your own lists of written assumptions. Whether you’re angry with your boss, frustrated with your teen’s behavior, or appalled at the state of the world’s environment, Katie suggests you write down your most honest thoughts on the matter, and then begin the examination. Starting with, “Is it true?” and continuing with explorations of “Who would you be without that thought?” this method allows you to get through unhelpful preconceptions and find peace. An integral part of the process is “turning the thought around,” and at first this can seem like you’re simply blaming yourself for everything. Push a little harder, and you’ll find a very responsible acceptance of reality, beyond questions of fault and blame.

The book is filled with examples of folks applying The Work to a variety of life situations, and reading other’s examples gets the idea across pretty clearly; chances are you’ll find your own frustrations echoed on the pages a few times. Many chapters are divided into specific topics, such as couples, money, addictions, and self-judgments, with one chapter devoted to exploring the method with children.

Questioning your own authority is never an easy process, but it seems well worth the potential rewards–stress-free choices, peace, and affection for those closest to you. –Jill Lightner

Author: Byron Katie, Stephen Mitchell
Paperback:  352 pages
Company: Three Rivers Press  (2003-12-23) (2003-12-23)
ISBN: 1400045371
List Price: $15.95
Amazon Price: $8.48
Used Price: $6.50

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated

The good news is that anxiety, guilt, pessimism, procrastination, low self–esteem, and other “black holes” of depression can be cured without drugs. In Feeling Good, eminent psychiatrist, David D. Burns, M.D., outlines the remarkable, scientifically proven techniques that will immediately lift your spirits and help you develop a positive outlook on life. Now, in this updated edition, Dr. Burns adds an All–New Consumer’s Guide To Anti–depressant Drugs as well as a new introduction to help answer your questions about the many options available for treating depression.

– Recognise what causes your mood swings

– Nip negative feelings in the bud

– Deal with guilt

– Handle hostility and criticism

– Overcome addiction to love and approval

– Build self–esteem

– Feel good everyday

Author: David D. Burns
Mass Market Paperback:  736 pages
Company: Harper  (1999-10-01) (1999-10-01)
ISBN: 0380810336
List Price: $7.99
Amazon Price: $4.15
Used Price: $2.99

Water for Elephants: A Novel
Jacob Jankowski says: “I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn’t always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was twenty-one. It wasn’t a romantic, carefree decision, to be sure. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition, returned to school, went to the exams, and didn’t write a single word. He walked out without completing the test and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob’s life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which he finds himself. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the “menagerie” and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can. August, the animal trainer, is a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose occasional flights into madness and brutality often have Jacob as their object. Jacob is the only person in the book who has a handle on a moral compass and as his reward he spends most of the novel beaten, broken, concussed, bleeding, swollen and hungover. He is the self-appointed Protector of the Downtrodden, and… he falls in love with Marlena, crazy August’s wife. Not his best idea.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there’s trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the “revenooers” or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. It is easy to see Marlena’s and Rosie’s pink sequins under the Big Top and to imagine their perfect choreography as they perform unbelievable stunts. The crowd loves it–and so will the reader. The ending is absolutely ludicrous and really quite lovely. –Valerie Ryan

Author: Sara Gruen
Paperback:  350 pages
Company: Algonquin Books  (2007-04-09)
ISBN: 1565125606
List Price: $13.95
Amazon Price: $3.92
Used Price: $2.81

Crucial Confrontations

The authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations show you how to achieve personal, team, and organizational success by healing broken promises, resolving violated expectations, and influencing good behavior

Discover skills to resolve touchy, controversial, and complex issues at work and at home–now available in this follow-up to the internationally popular Crucial Conversations.

Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you’ll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly–and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren’t just irritating, they’re costly–sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces.

Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like:

• An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?
• Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can’t meet–and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn’t want to hear complaints about it.
• Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.
• An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?
• Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.
• A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers “how things work around here” and decides not to say anything.

Everyone knows how to run for cover, or if adequately provoked, step up to these confrontations in a way that causes a real ruckus. That we have down pat. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn’t harm the relationship–and in fact, even strengthens it.

Crucial Confrontations borrows from twenty years of research involving two groups. More than 25,000 people helped the authors identify those who were most influential during crucial confrontations. They spent 10,000 hours watching these people, documented what they saw, and then trained and tested with more than 300,000 people. Second, they measured the impact of crucial confrontations improvements on organizational and team performance–the results were immediate and sustainable: twenty to fifty percent improvements in measurable performance.

Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
Paperback:  284 pages
Company: McGraw-Hill  (2004-08-26)
ISBN: 0071446524
List Price: $16.95
Amazon Price: $9.04
Used Price: $7.25