Making It: Getting What You Want: Love, Sex, Career, Family, and Self

Ruth Kennedy was a librarian and fitness instructor in Islington, Ontario.

The former hostess and interviewer of the City TV talk show “You’re Beautiful” proffers her philosophy for developing needed skills to obtain everything you aspire to in life. Most goals are not easy to reach because of stumbling blocks that seem almost impossible to overcome. The reader will learn how to build skills one by one, how to analyze and profit from apparent failure, and how to discard reminders of poor personal performance (episodes that are rarely remembered by anyone else). Micki Moore has had many struggles and set-backs, which she illustrates with anecdotes from her own life, as well as from the lives of other women who have “made it.”

Writing mainly for women, who need more help than men in learning to shift priorities (the result of early conditioning), Moore demonstrates the need to acquire motivation and tells how not to be intimidated, how to develop toughness, and how to become prepared. More than one third of the book discusses relations with men — as husbands, friends, lovers; the modernization of many women’s thinking regarding men involves an almost complete turn-around, from being man’s doormat to being a person with her own needs and life style.

Written in an almost breezy style, this easily read self-help book has many ideas and suggestions for the self-doubting, soul-searching woman who wants to change her life. Men wishing to understand the present-day woman would also profit from studying Making It.

Helen Bullock is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in many North American newspapers and magazines. At present she writes a weekly column for the Toronto Star.