The Genogram Journey: Reconnecting with Your Family

I love this book very much and I have almost every book by this author, but why did I give it only four stars? First let me talk about the positive things. The structure of the book remains mostly the same as the original edition "You Can Go Home Again" published 15 years ago, with an addition chapter on how to coach clients to do family-of-origin tasks in counseling. It also adds and updates several genograms (i.e., family trees) of the celebrities (including Barack Obama) and incorporates recent demographical changes of diverse family forms into the book. The author tells stories of each family and uses genogram as a tool to analyze complex family patterns within the social, cultural, historical, and political context. She does an excellent job at this. I think this book is very suitable for family therapy students and clinicians, and also for anyone who'd like to learn more about oneself by examining his/her multigenerational family dynamics. The contents are:1. Reconnecting with Your Family: Why Go Home Again?2. Family Trees: The Past As Prologue3. Family Stories, Myths, and Secrets4. Family Ties and Binds5. Death and Other Losses6. Where Do We Come From? Parents and Children7. Brothers and Sisters8. Couple Relationships9. Culture: Ethnicity, Race, Class, Religion, and Historical Period, with Tracey Laszloffy10. Reconnecting11. Coaching Clients on Work with Their FamiliesNow it's the negative part. One big problem I have to complain is neither about the content nor the author, but about the typeface of the book!! The size of the typeface is so small that I can hardly read. It's only about 1/2 size of average "readable" typeface in other books. I don't know why the publishers made this awful decision to reduce the typeface size. I understand that they want to save money (and the trees), but it shouldn't be done at the expense of readers' health of eyesight. This one weakness makes reading this book very painful for me. I hope this problem can be fixed in later revision.

Monica McGoldrick is the Mother of the Genogram and every new book she writes stories that show us the humor, tragedy, pain, joy and dysfunction of families. I always recommend her books to my students and colleagues as well as Clients. He explanations help me apply her insights as well as want to read every story about famous citizens from the past and present to make her case with riveting case studies.

This book neither instructs on how to build a genogram nor does it help you read one. It simply provides several ready made genograms and discusses the lives of the celebrities therein. Simply put, the book is mere gossip mongering. A genogram is only as reliable as the people reporting the information and the interpretation of the reader.

As expected

McGoldrick is a wizard of the Genogram and while I have only read the first edition the second looks equally well done. If you are looking for a resource to assist you in understanding families, this is the must have book on the subject.

This book is not a story book per se but a good description of how to organise family history research. The historical family genograms are very interesting.

Great condition and although I did not take the class, the book was so well written I read it anyway and gained a more in depth knowledge of Genograms.

The first two chapters are the most important ones

Lovely!!!'

Not a super usual book. Course requirement but will suggest to not use it again.

I was expecting more

Great update to the original

They delivered before I was expecting. Very nice book!