Reviews

"Friendshifts" is the word that sociologist Yager (Business Protocol: How To Survive & Succeed in Business, LJ 6/15/91) invented to explain how friendships change throughout life. Drawing on her own research, Yager discusses how friendships develop and how changes such as relocation, marriage, or a new job often provoke changes in relationships. Yager sees making friends as a skill that can be learned, but she cautions that each friendship is unique, with its own rules and privileges. Arguing that shared values are more important in predicting the longevity of a friendship than shared interests, Yager gives practical advice on how to nurture new friendships, maintain old friendships, salvage shaky friendships, and terminate destructive ones. Friendships at work, friendships with relatives, and ethnic, racial, and gender friendship patterns are also covered. Throughout, Yager ably demonstrates how friends can improve the quality of our lives, enhance our self-esteem, provide encouragement, and compensate for family defects. Well recommended for public libraries.-Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.

A rewarding, sensible self-help manual for making, keeping and improving friendships, sociologist Yager's how-to takes its title from a word she coined, which refers to the way friendships change as we move through life's stages. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with adults, children, teenagers, workers and executives, she examines the challenges to friendship posed by marriage, divorce, parenthood, job changes and geographic relocation. Yager, whose 10 nonfiction books include Single in America, has distilled a morass of psychological and sociological research, including her own. Among her findings: it takes an average of three years to form a genuine friendship; women, as they advance in the corporate hierarchy, increasingly distrust workplace friendships, whereas men open up and trust these friends more; friendships can be a source of help for dysfunctional families, and for adults who had poor early relationships with parents or siblings. This primer amply supports its central message, that friends are vital to our emotional health. (Jan.)