Book Reviews

How women can heal from adolescent father loss.

By Laraine Herring
Published by Hazelden

Review by David Palmer

“Every girl needs a ferryman to help her cross the river. When the mythic ferryman figure in her life is missing due to death or other loss, the journey is complicated.”

When you hear the testimony of women in recovery, there is almost always something about the father-daughter relationship. This is a memoir, and we have printed below what Hazelden says about the book on the back cover:

“Commitment, Trust. Intimacy. Self-confidence. Independence. These are critical areas of personal development in the passage from adolescent to adulthood. However, this path toward self–identity can become particularly difficult for women to navigate when, as adolescents they lose one of the most important relationships of their life: their relationship with their father.

“Written expressly for adult women, Lost Fathers is a healing, authoritative guide to understanding how behaviors, relationships and sense of self in adulthood are shaped by the experience of losing one’s father during adolescence to death, divorce, abandonment, incarceration or addiction.

“With gentle expertise, Laraine Herring blends poignant personal stories, the latest information in developmental psychology, and guided writing exercises in this much–needed therapeutic guide.”

The Biography of the cofounder of Al-Anon

By William G. Borchert

Review by David Palmer

Picture if you will, eight women parked in front of the Clinton Street Brooklyn home of Bill and Lois Wilson. Their motors are running and they are steamed.

On this night in 1938, their husbands, most of them newly sober, are attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with the organization’s co-founder, Bill Wilson. What ticks the ladies off is that their husbands have replaced drinking with meetings, leaving them once again alone and unloved.

CEO looks back on his life as a troubled teen

By Michael Kennon
Outskirts Press
$10. 95

Review by Dorothy Cox

Remembering vividly his own pain, shame and isolation as a runaway from age twelve to early adulthood, CEO Michael Kennon hopes his story will let the untold thousands of runaway children in the U.S. know that if he made it, they can too.

By Christopher Kennedy Lawford
William Morrow
$25.99

Review by David Palmer

“The morning of February 17, 1986, I woke up, as usual, with that weight in the pit of my stomach, knowing that all I had in front of me was another day of dancing with the 800-pound gorilla of addiction.”

And so begins Chris Lawford’s “moment of clarity” as he reports it in his introduction to this great book about how people recover from addictions—in this case 42 well-known people, many of them celebrities.