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When the mind wanders, happiness strays.
- John Tierney, NY Times

Therapy, lawyers, family and friends aren’t the only sources of help when you are trying to solve problems. You can take control and find ways to deal with your separation, divorce, and feelings generated by these events. So when your mind starts to wander and lead you down the path of negative thoughts or self-doubt, pick up one of the books listed below and turn those thoughts around.

This page lists books about divorce, relationships, and happiness recommended by JP and Tracy. Purchasing books through this site helps support our continued research.

Books about Divorce

Product Description

Practical, savvy, and wide-ranging, this resource shows men and women how to avoid the pitfalls that turn a straightforward divorce into a nightmare. Drawing on her own personal experience, the author also brings together the best advice from a wide range of experts that include divorce attorneys, mental-health professionals, and financial gurus. This guide coaches separating couples how to build a shortlist of the best divorce attorneys in their area, how to conduct an interview to find the right one, and what the full range of legal options are for each case. Further tips explain how to manage the paperwork, ways to lower legal costs, and practical advice for getting back to “normal” once the divorce is finalized. This reassuring manual also explains the stages of divorce grief and how to separate the emotional divorce from the legal divorce.

Product Description

This one-of-a-kind workbook streamlines the divorce process

This completely unique guide helps anyone —even someone enduring a not-so-easy split—create a complete, accessible record of absolutely everything needed to confidently tackle, organize, and prepare for the legal, emotional, and financial aspects of divorce. Family attorney Brette McWhorter Sember’s The Divorce Planner & Organizer includes:

• Suggestions for selecting an attorney and getting the most legal help for the dollar
• Tips on how to gather and organize information for easy access during legal proceedings
• Advice on required documentation for homes, cars, investments, bank accounts, debts, insurance, and household expenses
• A tracker to record alimony, child support payments, and children’s medical, educational, and athletic expenses
• A personal property inventory and wish list, a budget form, and fill-in contact information lists

From the Back Cover

Everything you need to take charge of your divorce and get what you deserve

Divorce is overwhelming enough without having to deal with the financial, personal, and legal paperwork. When you are organized, you feel more confident, and you are more likely to get what you want. The Divorce Organizer and Planner is your guide to managing your divorce and getting what you want–while keeping your legal expenses to a minimum. Written by a family attorney with years of experience helping people navigate the divorce process, this book empowers you with the knowledge and tools you need to take control of your divorce.

The Divorce Organizer and Planner arms you with dozens of worksheets, logs, checklists, and expert advice and explanations that will help you create a complete, accessible record of absolutely everything you’ll need to confidently tackle the legal, emotional, and financial aspects of divorce.

You’ll discover how to:

• Find and work with an attorney who’s right for you
• Learn how to choose and work with a mediator
• Gather and organize important information on property, investments, accounts, debts, insurance, and household expenses
• Keep clear records of alimony, child support, and children’s expenses
• Develop a personal property inventory, a budget, and a wish list for property division
• Decide what you want and what you need from the marital assets
• Successfully negotiate with your spouse and keep stress to a minimum
• Get the biggest bang for your legal buck

Providing everything you need to know to handle your divorce in a careful way, The Divorce Organizer and Planner will make a huge difference in the way you feel, the expenses you incur, and what you walk away with in the end.

Brette McWhorter Sember is a former matrimonial attorney and an experienced divorce and family mediator. A prolific self-help author specializing in making the law accessible to everyone, she has written fourteen books as well as numerous articles appearing in more than 140 publications, including Divorce magazine, and at MyCounsel.com and Lawyers.com.

Review

“A common-sense, compassionate, human book about the crazy process that more than half of us go through. This should be required reading with all marriage licenses.” –Philadelphia Inquirer

Product Description

A fully revised and updated edition of the essential guide for men and women moving through the turmoil of divorce.

Books about Happiness

Guest Reviewer: Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, and is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies–and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have–which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world.

Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness, and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating–and in some ways troubling–facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We’re far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren’t particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren’t nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that–and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. –Malcolm Gladwell

From Publishers Weekly

Though everyone wants to be happier, how many of us can actually define what that means? In his class, “Positive Psychology,” one of the most popular courses at Harvard University, Ben-Shahar teaches that happiness isn’t as elusive a concept as people think, and can actually be learned; he commits the fundamentals of his course to paper in this primer on getting happy, which he defines as a combination of pleasure (short-term happiness) and meaning (long-term). Divided into three parts, “What is Happiness?”, “Happiness Applied” and “Meditations on Happiness,” Ben-Shahar provides insight and exercises, prodding reflection in readers (“Do you accept negative emotions as natural?” “Do you see your work as a job, a career, or a calling?”) while explicating the relationships among happiness, motivation and goals. Though it sounds simple, Ben-Shahar insists on keen self-awareness and purposeful action to overcome entrenched patterns of despondency and/or disbelief. For answer-seekers, this is definitely a good start.
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