GETTING IT RIGHT: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career
Laraine T. Zappert, Ph.D.
Pocket Books
Nonfiction
ISBN: 0671041800

To her credit, Laraine T. Zappert, Ph.D., has included a litany of experiences in GETTING IT RIGHT: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family, and Career. In most books on the subject, we are usually bombarded with the complete ability to balance life and work and family from celebrities who have millions of dollars, fleets of nannies, and stylists who save them from bad hair days. Zappert talks to women from all walks of life, women who have continued to work and thrive, women who have stayed home and thrived, women who have gone back to work only to have great difficulties at first, women who have stayed home and almost wasted away from the cabin fever. Wherever you fit --- if you do --- into these categories, you will find some great advice about how to make the best of your choices.

The women who share their life stories here have been part of a study at Stanford University in which Zappert examined the choices, and consequences of those choices, of women who attended the Graduate Business program at the school. The women went on to jobs as varied as sales managers to CEOs. Some had difficulty with their choices, others were committed to their choice from the moment they found out that they were pregnant. The study affords Zappert the opportunity to look at a wide spectrum of women professionals, whom she refers to as Pioneers (those who graduated before 1976), Successors (graduates between 1976 and 1985), or Settlers (graduates from 1986 to 1995) --- it is her way of saying that the balancing act she is talking about in this book is still something of a brave new world, although women have been attempting it for decades now. Zappert counts herself among those who are trying to make it work, and her commitment to finding a way to help women make good and realistic choices comes through with heart and soul.

"The illusion that often exists is that other women are doing it better. Other women are getting it right. They are managing to have it all, with energy and spirit to spare. Yet the very fact that such an illusion exists does a great disservice to those of us who are striving to achieve the kind of life that we had hoped for when we embarked on our professional careers...it is to address the issues of excellence, balance and basic sanity for professional women that this book is dedicated."

I think it is fair to say that Zappert has reached her goal here with tremendous success. This is a book that any working mother will find enlightening and helpful.

   --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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