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Work & Family: Essays from the "Work & Family" Column of The Wall Street Journal
 
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Work & Family: Essays from the "Work & Family" Column of The Wall Street Journal [Hardcover]

Wall Street Journal (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)


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Book Description

March 30, 1999
Every Wednesday, 1.8 million Wall Street Journal readers eagerly turn to Sue Shellenbarger's "Work & Family" column for advice, guidance, encouragement, and insights into the most important social issue of our day: balancing career and personal life. Since creating the column in 1991, Shellenbarger has brought her unique wit and wisdom to the problems successful people encounter in managing child care, elder care, burn-out, job sharing, marital stress, coping with emergencies, and corporate and personal trade-offs. Now Shellenbarger has collected the very best of her "Work & Family" essays in a single volume for all readers.

A hardworking parent herself, Shellenbarger knows what it's like to put in long hours at a high-pressure job while trying to raise kids, sustain a marriage, and carve out precious personal time. In her columns, she zeroes in on real people and the work-family balancing acts they perform every day. People like magazine editor Mary Hickey who figured out ways to look like a workaholic on the job while still having a life. Bill Galston who resigned a promising career as a White House policy adviser so he could spend more time with his ten-year-old son. And research manager Rose Arnone whose performance skyrocketed under a boss who valued productivity over "face time."

Clearly organized by theme, Work & Family covers every aspect of the subject from starting a family in the midst of a flourishing career to figuring out suitable (and affordable) child care arrangements for children of different ages; from dealing with special workplace issues like job sharing, telecommuting, and family-unfriendly bosses to caring for aging family members. Each section gathers together dozens of her most incisive, practical, and eye-opening columns.

Filled with on-target advice while offering solid, unwavering support, Work & Family speaks directly to the needs of smart, ambitious, hardworking people. Having a life while succeeding at a demanding job has never been tougher: here is one book that helps us all meet and master the challenges of our complicated lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Work & Family is an extensive and fascinating collection of Wall Street Journal columnist Sue Shellenbarger's essays on balancing work and family life. Shellenbarger's beat is the two-career family with contemporary parents wired to fax, phone, and beeper in case the kids have an emergency. In these 90 brief essays, Shellenbarger covers tremendous ground. She describes the travails of the new two-worker family and the relationship between a parent's job situation and a child's happiness. She explores in depth the "highwire walk" work world's joys and pitfalls of telecommuting, job sharing, family-friendly and -unfriendly firms, and on-site and inadequate day care. Later essays focus on eldercare and the "sandwich generation." In "Work Gets Wilder as Employees Insist on Stable Family Life," Shellenbarger describes a father commuting 700 miles a week to keep his daughters in their familiar school situations. In "How to Look Like a Workaholic While Still Having a Life," she discusses managers' obsession with "face-time" and the hysterical tactics that hard-working but not always present employees use to circumvent the issue. Shellenbarger's essays are snappy, funny, political, and precise. The fighting tone of these pieces provides a great antidote to the numbing poison of family fatigue, fluorescent lights, and cubicles.

From Publishers Weekly

"Nobody on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office.'" Shellenbarger, who has been writing the "Work and Family" column for the Wall Street Journal since 1991, uses this popular quote from Peter Lynch, a former fund manager, to dramatize her concern about the difficulties of balancing work and family life. The theme of how to satisfy competing demands runs through all these thoughtful essays. Working parents will nod with recognition at Shellenbarger's anecdotes, which are drawn both from her own experience as a working mother and from letters she has received from her readers. She provides descriptions of a variety of innovations with which both employers and employees have been experimenting in hopes of easing this problem: e.g., Seattle software maker WRQ's employee-friendly office buildings include breast-feeding rooms for mothers who bring their children to work. Shellenbarger also advises readers to advocate for telecommuting and other family-friendly work arrangements. Of particular interest is the section on how to deal with the demands of caring for aging and ill parents and still hold down a job, an issue that will take on even more importance as the aging population grows. Among the ideas Shellenbarger floats is a proposal that employers relocate the elderly parents of employees to the area where their children live. Like most collections of newspaper columns, this one is notable more for breadth than for depth. These short, sometimes pointed pieces only begin to address the complexities of working families in the postindustrial economy. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 333 pages
  • Publisher: Ballantine Books; 1 edition (March 30, 1999)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0345422260
  • ISBN-13: 978-0345422262
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,956,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Best of "Work and Family", September 14, 2000
By 
Bill Sonsin (Prescott, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Work & Family: Essays from the "Work & Family" Column of The Wall Street Journal (Hardcover)
Since the early 1990's, Sue Shellenbarger has written her column 3 times most months (always on Wednesday) in the Wall Street Journal (page B1). This book is a collection of her best over the years. She deals with a wide variety of topics in the ongoing quest of society to balance the demands of work and personal life, touching on a wide variety of heavy topics such as balancing work demands with child care, elderly parent care, relocation, divided families and avoiding burnout as well as some lighter topics such as what to wear (or not wear) when working at home. As someone who looks forward to her column each week, I found it most enjoyable to revisit some of my favorites from the past as well as make a new acquaintance with several that I had missed. Her columns are readable, well researched, full of useful information and keep your attention. The book did likewise. If you already acquainted with her work, the book is a must read. If you're looking for good information in this area, I would highly recommend it.
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