Customer Reviews

The Art of Staying Together (New Consciousness Reader)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
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Mr. Waldman does a wonderful job here in organizing and explaining essays from a variety of sources. The topics cover a broad range of personal interactions and focuses on 'communication' as the key to healthy relationships. The best thing about this book is that it offers help to couples young and old, new and experienced.

Here is a relationship cuisine that is bound to nourish and awaken interest within and between people desiring lives together. This is a book of hope and heart, a collection of works that would be enhanced by being r3ead aloud, idscussed and shered in depth with at least one other person. Waldman makes very good points about our wanting love, togetherness with significant others, and wanting to endure with one another as long as there is meaning, and our needs, values, and directions are being shared and fulfilled. Provocative, thoughtful, and helpful - a superior gathering of nourishing articles. (Reviewed in New Perspectives Journal)

A mixed bag of philosophies. There are many other books more practical and useful than this (examples Gottman, Parrott).

This is not another how-to book. Instead, it describes the elements essential to making relationships work, and saving those that are in trouble. I found many excellent essays that helped me think more deeply about what I wanted in relationship, and it helped to burst some bubbles as well -- fantasies I had that made my goals seem too idealistic to achieve. In Waldman's introduction, he lists 25 criteria that American women demand from their mates -- 20 more than anyone else asks for in other parts of the world. We seem to want it all; no wonder we're so angry and disappointed when reality sets in! Thanks to this book, I was able to approach love more realistically. Today I'm in a wonderful, mutually caring relationship. Finally!

I love anthologies because they can give you an overview from many authorities on a topic. I'm a researcher of relationship dynamics at a University center (and, in case you didn't notice, the editor of this volume), and there's only one chapter in this anthology (by Hendrix)that I would consider outdated. The book will point out the major criteria for what makes relationships work, and how they get into trouble. The third section discusses the psychospiritual philosophies that a person can incorporate into his or her love life.