Books about Estrangement from Amazon.com

Behaviorist David Lieberman thinks all conflicts have something in common. Whether you're dealing with the complaining customer, the coworker with charisma bypass surgery, or the fallout from forgetting a friend's birthday, the resolution lies in understanding what he calls the "conflict recipe." The ingredients of all conflicts are fear and perceived loss of respect, says Lieberman. When people and events don't respond as we planned, we fear a loss of control. We compensate and translate this fear--and the lowered sense of esteem it brings--into anger. Ergo, conflict resolution is accomplished by offering the injured party the ingredients for restoring self-regard and a sense of control.

Based on this recipe, Lieberman creates dozens of step-by-step scenarios for resolving conflicts of every shape, including family money feuds, contretemps with friends, personality clashes, passive-aggressive coworkers, and differences in values. Other particularly strong chapters direct readers to seek forgiveness for their own behavior and provide emergency techniques for standoffs and longtime estrangement. Lieberman explains his basic theory with clarity, and illustrates its practice with smart strategies and chapter summaries. This practicality and consistency allow Make Peace with Anyone to deliver on the title's promise. --Barbara Mackoff.
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Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.

Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others.

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Heal and Forgive presents a first-hand description of child abuse and navigates the reader through the distinctive stumbling blocks encountered by adult survivors of abuse who are attempting to forgive. This thought-provoking illustration offers new hope to those who have given up at the prospect of forgiving. Many survivors of abuse long to forgive their abusers; however, many common approaches to forgiveness are not appropriate for situations involving abuse. This work demonstrates to the survivor the additional steps necessary to achieve forgiveness in the face of abuse. Surprisingly, it is often the very process of not forgiving, of acknowledging the pain, and taking the steps to heal that frees the abused to forgive. This book clearly points to the need to validate their story with a sympathetic listener, express their anger in appropriate ways, mourn for their losses, and protect themselves and others from re-injury. Further, this work explains to the individual that forgiveness does not mean excusing. No one needs to forgive the acts perpetrated against them in order to let go of resentment and forgive the being who harmed them. Forgiveness is not an event of immediacy. It's not a bolt of lightning that brightens the soul and burns the pain to ashes. Forgiveness is a process that is transformational. When all is said and done, the final process is an act of love..
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Mending the Ties That Bind

Divorce; disputes over inheritances, family business, or elder care. Rifts over marriage partners, career choices, or sexual orientation--these are just some of the many ways that even close families can break apart. Yet this all-too-common and often devastating family problem, and its emotional fallout, has gone virtually unaddressed…until now.

In this remarkable book, Barbara LeBey, an Atlanta attorney and former judge, who herself suffered and resolved a family estrangement, shares the stories of people from every walk of life and of every age and race, to show how such rifts often begin and how they can usually be resolved.

Working closely with two family therapists, LeBey offers a set of tested guidelines to help you approach alienated or angry family members, deal with your own issues, and mend your broken family relationships--even if you think it may already be too late.
Compassionate, practical, and full of rich insight, this book is a beacon of hope and healing to which families everywhere will turn again and again..
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Heal and Forgive II The Journey from Abuse and Estrangement to Reconciliation Nancy Richards Anyone who has heard the devastating words, "I never want to see you again!" from a parent, sibling, or child, knows the torment of family exile. All one needs to do is search the web for sites dealing with family estrangement to find endless choices for the countless individuals seeking help with family cut-offs. Google lists 776,000. Yahoo lists 890,000! Although there are no formal statistics for family estrangement, the numbers available are alarming. From celebrities to friends, co-workers, and neighbors, we find people everywhere dealing with the effects of family rifts. After a painful fourteen-year estrangement, author Nancy Richards and her family reunited. Heal and Forgive II: The Journey from Abuse and Estrangement to Reconciliation presents a first-hand description of the long journey towards healing and offers a blueprint for coming to terms with the past. Reconciliation can bring joy, excitement and a sense of awe like that of a miracle. At the same time, reunions can be frightening, stressful, fragile, and wrought with many pitfalls. Rebuilding relationships requires a great deal of emotional work and a willingness for each family member involved. Often, re-establishing relationships with family members can appear to be an impossible task. Indeed, reuniting is not possible for everyone. Some individuals experience continued physical and emotional violence within their families to a degree that prohibits any safe contact. Other estranged individuals may desire a reunion only to find family members unwilling to see them. Yet sometimes people are surprised when the road to healing and recovery leads to new beginnings. Whether re-establishing a relationship with a family member or remaining apart, healing is vital for the individual's happiness and well-being. This work demonstrates to the reader the healing process necessary to make peace with the past, healing in a fashion that maintains wholesome separateness with or without rebuilding new relationships. This thought-provoking work effectively diagrams the healing and reconciliation process while placing the reader's well-being firmly in his or her own hands. Endorsements "Nancy Richard's latest book reminds us that wisdom born of pain and struggle is true wisdom. She has the ability in sharing her story to engage others with similar experiences and in ways that give insight and direction. We are indebted to Richards for sharing her strength and courage with us. Again she helps us realize the limitations and capacities of the human heart and gives us hope that adequate healing from violence in families may be possible. I recommend this book to any survivor struggling with the brokenness that an abuser can do to a family. May truth help to heal the wounds and soften the scars." Rev. Dr. Marie M. Fortune, Founder and Senior Analyst, FaithTrust Institute.
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We've all been advised to forgive and forget, but rarely has anyone suggested a way to reconcile without necessarily forgiving. I Thought We'd Never Speak Again does. It covers every sort of contention, from seemingly minor differences that can escalate over time to larger issues of abuse, neglect, and dysfunction.

Author Laura Davis (The Courage to Heal) once again comes from a very personal place in this book; she has slowly renewed relations with her mother's family after 10 years with no contact. As she interviews people and shares their stories, she uses the wisdom they've gained to illustrate numerous ways to reconcile--sometimes involving forgiveness and sometimes not. From the family who lost a member to a drunk driver or drive-by shooting to generations of kids on opposite sides of racial, religious, or political issues, the process of coming to peace is a lengthy one, marked by both pain and rewards.

Useful for adults who are dealing with personal issues or families trying to move beyond the emotional aftermath of 9/11, this loving and thoughtful book examines how we can all work together to achieve understanding. --Jill Lightner.
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Learning from Other Worlds provides both a portrait of the development of science fiction criticism as an intellectual field and a definitive look at the state of science fiction studies today. Its title refers to the essence of “cognitive estrangement” in relation to science fiction and utopian fiction—the assertion that by imagining strange worlds we learn to see our own world in a new perspective. Acknowledging an indebtedness to the groundbreaking work of Darko Suvin and his belief that the double movement of estrangement and cognition reflects deep structures of human storytelling, the contributors assert that learning-from-otherness is as natural and inevitable a process as the instinct for imitation and representation that Aristotle described in his Poetics.
In exploring the relationship between imaginative invention and that of allegory or fable, the essays in Learning from Other Worlds comment on the field’s most abiding concerns and employ a variety of critical approaches—from intellectual history and genre studies to biographical criticism, feminist cultural studies, and political textual analysis. Among the topics discussed are the works of John Wyndham, Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanislau Lem, H.G. Wells, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as the media’s reactions to the 1997 cloning of Dolly the Sheep. Darko Suvin’s characteristically outspoken and penetrating afterword responds to the essays in the volume and offers intimations of a further stage in his long and distinguished career.
This useful compendium and companion offers a coherent view of science fiction studies as it has evolved while paying tribute to the debt it owes Suvin, one of its first champions. As such, it will appeal to critics and students of science fiction, utopia, and fantasy writing.

Contributors. Marc Angenot, Marleen S. Barr, Peter Fitting, Carl Freedman, Edward James, Fredric Jameson, David Ketterer, Gerard Klein, Tom Moylan, Rafail Nudelman, Darko Suvin
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Blue Kansas Sky collects four powerful and beautifully written novellas (one previously unpublished) by one of science fiction's best writers, Michael Bishop, winner of the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award.

The opening story is "Blue Kansas Sky," which is original to this volume, and may or may not be fantasy. The story line alternates between the coming-of-age of Sonny Peacock, fatherless child of the '50s and '60s, and the redemption of his ex-inmate uncle, Rory Peacock. Set in 1988, the World Fantasy Award-nominated "Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana" examines South Africa's brutal institutionalized racism through the lens of a white Afrikaner who becomes a quantum-mechanical invisible man to members of his own race. In the Hugo and Sturgeon Award finalist "Cri de Coeur," three Earthly starships travel to the Epsilon Eridani star system, with disastrous results. In the Hugo and Nebula Award finalist "Death and Designation among the Asadi," an anthropologist comes to the planet BoskVeld to study an inexplicable alien race; he may be the first to unlock their secrets, or he may be going mad--or both. --Cynthia Ward.
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In a world flooded with information, images, and sounds – where the distinction between real and simulated becomes increasingly blurred – one of the most pressing concerns of the theatre is how to subvert the stock responses of an audience and make the well-known fresh and meaningful again. Situating the practice of theatrical estrangement firmly in its social and political contexts, Theatre of Estrangement looks at how this concern has manifested itself in Russian and German avant-garde theatre.

Silvija Jestrovic traces the concept of estrangement from its early formulation in the Russian Formalist School of Literary Criticism embodied in the experiments of the Russian avant-garde, to its so-called apotheosis in the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Drawing from a variety of sources – theatrical performances, dramatic works, visual art, film, political events, biographical data – she demonstrates that theatrical estrangement is not only an abstract theoretical postulate, but also a practical artistic strategy shaped by the cultural and historical climate. In the historical avant-garde, Jestrovic argues, estrangement became a way of thinking, a means of comprehending the world, and even a lifestyle. Yet, devices of making the familiar strange are destined to erode in one historical and cultural context and become rediscovered in another to rejuvenate stale art forms and open the door to a fresh and more critical perception of reality. Theatre of Estrangement attempts to make that rediscovery.

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