Customer Reviews

Respect: An Exploration

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores six different themes of respect by profiling six individuals that she associates with those qualities. I found the book uneven between the chapters, but that is because I found some of the people she profiled more interesting than others. I particularly enjoyed her chapter on David Wilkins, the Harvard Law School Professor; his strides for excellence seems to measure merely his own inadequacies (his was the chapter on Self-Respect). I was fascinated reading about him.

Still, I would recommend this book taken as an exploration--not definitive, not a self-help book, and not an exposition. But it is inspiring, challenging, informative, and she writes very well.

Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot has presented some wonderful stories of some very engaging people. I enjoyed reading about their lives and the author's involvement with them. The book had the potential to provide a real service to all of us struggling with this area of behavior and specifically to those of us trying to help others give respect. However, the book just comes to a dead stop at the end of the last story . . .with no effort to pull together the common themes about respect---what have learned about being respectful? How can we be more respectful? It's up to the reader to go back and dig out the learnings from these stories. I subsequently wrote to the author asking for more information or a summary of respectful behaviours and she, in turn, turned my request over to her graduate assistant in a gesture that was profoundly disrepectful.

I attended a three day conference in Utah recently at which Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot was guest speaker. The topic of her speech was centered on giving and getting respect, and she read liberally from the book's last chapter. It was profoundly moving to listen as she recounted her interview with a family who had lost their 19 year old son to leukemia (?) ... the writing style was near poetic. The emotional intelligence was pure and strong. I have ordered the book and am looking forward to learning more about the reciprocal nature of respect and it's powerful effects.

In the book, "Respect" the author goes through many storeies of cases where people have given respect to others, some who are poor, sick etc. Lightfoot first goes into and talks about Respect in general, about how we all should give respect and be very respectfull to others in need. At first, there is stories of young mothers pregant who can not afford hospitlzation, and how the lady has a open clinic and takes care of numerous patients a day, for free. There is many other stories that are happy, sad, and humerous. This book opens a new world to me, and i think the more i think about it i would love to help people in need, to show that everyone should have respect even if they are not like everyone else.

I bought this for a college class, and it is now one of my favorites. It does a good job of giving the reader an insight into how respect in relationships helps build healthy connections as well as teach others to empathize in situtions similar to their own.

I really, really did not enjoy reading this book. I sort of liked the first chapter, but it was all downhill from there. The author makes all these comparisons between the subjects of her chapters, but they're all obvious, and it makes it seem like she's just trying to take up space and talk down to readers--like she's assuming we couldn't draw these very obvious conclusions ourselves. I didn't even think that most of the people she featured in the chapters were that remarkable. Definitely not a book to waste your money on.