Member Book Reviews

All reviews are from the publisher unless otherwise attributed. Additional reviews may be available on the Amazon.com web site. To order a book, click on the title and you will be taken to the Amazon.com page for that particular book.

If you are an FPS member and have written a book, let us know. We may be able to include it on theses pages.

Dr. Gaby Cora works with people and organizations that want to be healthy while they become wealthy. She’s a wellness coach, corporate consultant, best-selling author, keynote speaker, medical doctor, MBA, and she’s author of The Power of Wellbeing Series: Leading under Pressure, Managing Work in Life, and Quantum Wellbeing and of the Alpha Series, with Alpha Female Leader.

Burak, Carl
ASSHOLISTIC HEALTHCARE
'10, 152 PP. (8.4 X 5.4 X 0.3in)
$19.95, paper
ISBN-10: 0972335749
ISBN-13: 978-0972335744

"Assholistic Healthcare is a frank discussion about what we should know and do as patients, and we are all patients -- people embattled and kicked around by a system constantly fighting a war in which we are the casualties. We have struggled to achieve healthcare reform on many occasions over the past 100 years. Each time we failed, it's not been because our system doesn't need improving -- it does. We fail because politics, partisanship, and profit-motivation get in the way. Right now and over the next few years we have an opportunity to get it right. As patients we know all too well how we have been left out of the roundtable negotiations with insurance and drug companies, hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and our representatives in Congress. Being informed and becoming your own advocate about critical health issues is the only way to convince politicians you will no longer be duped by their bull speak. We patients are really the only special interest that members of Congress and the President should represent. In Assholistic Healthcare, Dr. Burak points the way out of medicine's moral mess in a manner that honors the patient more than profits and political power. This is not a political book -- it is not a partisan book -- it is a patient's book!" From Amazon.com.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are central issues in a national debate that will not be resolved until well into the twenty-first century. They are predominantly ethical issues now confronting the United States and other countries. In all probability these issues will cause as much social upheaval as the abortion debate. The goal of this book is to inform the public so they may actively participate in the debate and help in its resolution. The author familiarizes readers with current medical practices in order to make better decisions for themselves and their families regarding health care and end-of-life medical dilemmas. Patients must become more knowledgeable about health care to insure that their needs and wishes are respected. The hospice movement, "right-to- die" societies, assisted suicides, "do not resuscitate," and discontinuing life-support measures are very important topics covered in this book. Physicians, ethicists, lawyers, clergymen, judges and health care administrators should consider this a "must read" text.

There are now many fine books on psychotherapy, but the author felt that a basic, simply written book, with a minimum of theory, would be helpful to the beginning therapist. This is a practical book that includes only the more important issues that he has learned in forty years of study, practice, and teaching. The author tells the reader how he conducts psychotherapy: by having a format in mind, taking a comprehensive history, and a careful, observing examination of the patient. He then advises on how to conduct psychotherapy with various patients and with special consideration of certain problems. The book is clear enough to instruct the beginning therapist, yet complicated enough to allow the experienced psychotherapist to gain a few "pearls." The emphasis is on individual, dynamic psychotherapy. Once these fundamentals are learned, then technical procedures from the other theoretical approaches that have proven helpful can be added to the therapist's repertoire. The author indicates that there are no pure forms of psychotherapy and that, in time, each therapist will develop her own style, depending on her temperament and training. Some techniques she will follow exactly, some will be modified and others rejected. Dynamic psychotherapy is based on these fundamental concepts, but the technique has been modified to conform to the scientific and economic temper of the times. If one follows Doctor Greenberg's psychotherapy, responds to case managers with words similar to those he gives the reader, and allows results with patients to demonstrate the efficacy, the therapist will get approvals and get paid for helping patients in this way.

Remarks by Tracy Anglada:

"If you parent or treat a child with bipolar disorder then you know the difficult questions you are faced with in every phase of this illness from first diagnosis, treatment concerns, school issues and parenting- to dealing with your own emotions and the transition into adulthood. As a parent, I too have faced those same questions. That is why I am so delighted to have partnered with Dr. Hakala to bring you answers to all those tough questions in our book, The Childhood Bipolar Disorder AnswerBook. I hope you will find that the question/answer format of this new book makes it easy to get the information you need. The book will be out this summer and is available for preorder. In the meantime, if you would like to preview the book including all 275 questions and read some sample answers please visit www.childhoodbipolaronline.com ."

The layperson is aided in recognizing and understanding Borderline Personality Disorder, which afflicts 6 to 10 million Americans. Addresses different types of therapy--group, individual, psychotherapy, hospitalization, and drugs--how they work and when they're suitable. Dr. Moskovitz is a Fellow in the American Psychiatric Association.

"Excellent book especially written for borderlines. Gently and beautifully
written to assist the borderline and their friends and families to understand
this painful illness and some etiology of this disorder. The book is written
in such a way as if the author has his arms around you all through the book."

Patty Johnson, MSW

Moskovitz, Richard
CAROUSEL MUSIC
ISBN: 0741421585
$17.95 paper 6" x 9" 256 pages

A review of the book, Carousel Music, by Rick Moskovitz, M.D.

Dr. Moskovitz has once again written a book for us. This time it is a novel which both entertains and teaches at many different levels. On the surface, we are introduced to Stephanie, an extremely complex 23 year old woman who, while in psychotherapy with Dr. Kennith Miller, writes a letter to her father insinuating he has sexually assaulted her in the past. Her father decides to sue Dr. Miller for implanting false memories into Stephanie’s head.

Stephanie, who has no childhood memories of events before age 12, describes a father who is a recovering alcoholic who drank heavily when she was a child. She tells us of her tumultuous adolescence filled with promiscuity, substance abuse, self injurious behavior, bingeing, purging, body image distortions and symptoms of a borderline personality disorder.

But this is not just a book about Stephanie and the debate about false memory syndrome. On a deeper level, this is also a book about psychotherapy. In it Dr. Moskovitz examines and explains the multiple techniques and experiences of a knowledgeable psychiatrist. He shows us what it means to take a detailed family history. He describes a great variety of useful techniques spanning a spectrum from dream analysis using Gestalt techniques to the treatment of dissociative states with hypnosis. He illustrates resistance to therapy and how to deal with it. He demonstrates the emergence of transference and counter transference with clarity and openness.

Interwoven in this is yet a third level, that of the process of a medical lawsuit. He delves into the techniques lawyers commonly use and discusses how attorneys in a lawsuit are affected by both their conscious and unconscious needs. He educates us about legal matters such as handling subpoenas and the issues of psychiatric confidentiality, but also tells us what it is like to be sued, not only the technical process, but the emotional aspects and the effects on us and those around us.

In summary, this is a novel about the life of a patient with a borderline personality disorder, how she regains memories and is able to put them together with affect during therapy. It is also a textbook of psychotherapy and the process of psychiatric thinking. Despite the different levels that are intertwined, Dr. Moskovitz never loses his focus as a psychiatrist. He uses his extensive knowledge and practice of psychotherapy to weave this fictional account. I learned a great deal reading this book and I highly recommend it to the lay public, for whom it will be entertaining, to residents, for whom it should be on the required reading list and to experienced psychiatrists who can always learn more.

Reviewed by Francine L. Gelfand, M.D.

"I read this new novel in one day, fulfilling my definition of "a good read". The writing is skillful, the characters are well-developed, the foreshadowing is subtle, and the resolution is dramatic. Author Dr. Rick Moskovitz wonderfully weaves into the story a description of the how, what, and why of psychotherapy. The release of this book could not be more timely because it makes great P.R. for psychiatrists. Psychiatrists, students, and the general public will all find something of interest in this novel. The art work on the cover is enough reason to buy the book, too."

“Eric Pfeiffer has written a useful, Dr. Spock-like handbook for growing old, a book that can be kept in easy reach and referred to often whenever you feel you need useful facts or advice.

However, he has written much more than that; he has written a very wise book. Therefore, when you first begin to read this book, start on the last chapters—where the “music” lives. By reading Chapters Twelve through Fifteen first, you can learn to trust that the author has traveled the path that you are traveling with compassion and deep understanding, and that you can trust the good advice of the earlier chapters.

Eric Pfeiffer is ideally suited to write this book. I have been following his career as a friend and as a student for 45 years, so I know a little about what I am promising the reader. Eric had written a textbook of psychiatry by the time he finished residency. In other words, he was not satisfied with just learning a field, but he wished to become its master.

Equally important, by the time Pfeiffer finished medical school he had already published his first book of poetry—and not with a vanity press. He understood the heart of medicine as well as the facts. Then for the next 45 years Eric has been a gerontologist, as a researcher, a practitioner, and as an administrator. Thus, 14 Winning Strategies for Successful Aging is what you would expect from a polymath, a poet, and a lifelong competitor. It is a very wise book on how to succeed in aging."

Remarks by George E. Vaillant, M.D., psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research for the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital.

About the Author: Eric Pfeiffer, M.D. is the founding director of the Suncoast Alzheimer's and Gerontology Center at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa.

Myers, Wade C.
JUVENILE SEXUAL HOMICIDE
ISBN: 0125123035
$83.95 Hardcover: 185 pages ;Publisher: Academic Press; 1st edition (January 15, 2002)

"In Juvenile Sexual Homicide, Wade C. Myers, MD, addresses, in matter-of-fact, clinical detail, the disturbing subject of sexually motivated murder committed by a juvenile. He carefully delineates the varieties of personality disorder, emotional disturbance, sadism, and other perversions observed in cases culled from the literature as well as his own work as a forensic psychiatrist and director of the Psychiatry and the Law Clinic at the University of Florida. Readers are forewarned that his 185-page book is liberally illustrated with crime scene photographs and graphic artwork by several offenders.

The centerpiece of the book is the author's descriptive study of 16 cases of juvenile sexual homicide (attempted homicide in seven of these cases) identified through Florida state corrections records."

From the Review in JAMA. 2003;289:3312-3313.

"Developed for use in the clinical setting, Concise Guide to Marriage and Family Therapy gives you core knowledge in the field in a single quick-reading, quick-reference volume. With brief, to-the-point guidance and step-by-step protocols, Concise Guide to Marriage and Family Therapy is an invaluable resource for the busy clinician and therapist in training.

With the help of detailed indexes, fast-reading narrative, and lots of summary charts, you'll find the answers you need in seconds. Concise Guide to Marriage and Family Therapy puts the most essential information at your fingertips, with practical guidance on how to

Concise Guide to Marriage and Family Therapy offers you a wealth of practical guidance based on the latest research, condensed into a single information-packed reference. For the quick facts you need to make better clinical decisions for improved outcomes, you won't find a more useful tool.

"This text, written for psychiatry residents, provides the competencies for the theory and practice of marital and family therapy. It is based on evidence-based data and each family therapy competency is keyed to chapters in the text."—From the Author

Contents
Development of the field and definitions. Functional families. Dysfunctional families. Conducting a family evaluation. Formulating an understanding of the family problem areas. Goals. Family treatment: strategies and techniques. Course of family therapy. Promoting change in family treatment. Family treatment: general considerations. Dysfunctional couples and couples therapy. Marital and sex therapy. Separation and divorce. Indications and contraindications for family therapy. Ethical and professional issues. Index.

About the Authors
Eva C. Ritvo, M.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of Miami School of Medicine in Miami, Florida.

Ira D. Glick, M.D., is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. Recently, Dr. Glick won an AAMFT lifetime achievement award for his research, and a Northern. California. Therapists' Lifetime Achievement Award."
Taken from APPI Description