The art of helping

by Robert R. Carkhuff

This is the eighth edition of The Art of Helping. More than 500,000 copies have been sold over three decades. Literally, millions of people have been trained in helping skills. Many more have been recipients of these skills. The effects upon hundreds of thousand of these recipients have been researched. The results are skills acquisition and use are spectacularly powerful. This book explains the essential interpersonal skills needed by professional and lay counselors, teachers, business managers, parents, everyone.

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Cody Westcott · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be the worst book I've ever read. It's at least top 5. First, the book is roughly 250 pages, but nearly every page is half blank. So they wasted twice as much paper as was needed printing this garbage heap of a book.

Second, the material is unbearably repetitive. The author repeats the same advice about five times before moving on, and then comes back to repeat that advice again a few chapters later. This book could have been about 25-30 pages long had the author not repeated himself so much and not printed only a paragraph per page.

Third, the language is unnecessarily technical. It's not technical in the sense that it's hard to understand, just technical in the sense that it's dry and boring.

Finally, the overall point of the book is laughable. The author gives several case examples to illustrate his method which would be comedic of they weren't meant to be serious. The whole book can be summed up as: Listen to people and repeat back what they say using different words, then suggest goals for them in order to change. That's it. That's the book, and it took 250 unbearably dry, half empty pages for the author to make this point.

[Taylor Diehl · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the very '90s looking cover and the large sans serif font throughout, it is instantly clear that The Art of Helping in the 21st Century was written... at the turn of the century. The insight it offers into the current century is therefore limited. That being said, I found the content to be very helpful. Carkhuff lays out a system for helping others that is straightforward and applicable. While I wouldn't use this as a rulebook for counseling, it is definitely a good resource for reference and a good foundation to build upon. I will likely return to this book in the future for that purpose.

[Phillip · Rating 1 out of 5]

like many psycho-babble books the first 6 page introduction is good. However, the book rapidly declined afterwards.