Sue Shellenbarger

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
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.… (altro)