Dr. Browne's advice--sometimes clever, occasionally startling, always sound--goes to the heart of this fallacy. Drawing from the thousands of questions her radio listeners call in to ask her each year, she has written a book to help us all find a way to lead happier and more productive lives. Dr. Browne believes we can do this if we stop trying to assign blame--either to ourselves or to others--for life's natural lack of perfection and learn to accept ourselves for what we are.

The book is divided into five sections, each dealing with a particular concern: First Family, Friends and Lovers, Marriage, Kids, and Work. Within each section Dr. Browne answers questions that range from "I'm really lonely. Everybody seems cold and uncaring. Why don't I have any friends?" to "He won't give me his home phone number. Do you think he's married?" (Answer: "Yes.") Along the way Dr. Browne reassures parents who are worried because their kids lie all the time; a husband whose wife is insanely jealous and has accused him of having an affair with the postmistress, who is ninety and bald; the grown child of an alcoholic mother who asks if she has to continue the uncomfortalbe Sunday visits; and a woman who finds her boss adorable and wants to know if she should risk an office romance.

To each of these questions and scroes more, Dr. Browne gives considered, sensible advice. Her tone is often brisk and colloquial: "Women who date married men should not wear mascara," but what she is saying always has the solid ring of thoughtful professionalism: "If this has happened to you more than once, you may need to talk with someone about a difficulty with commitment, going for the unobtainable, dislikng men, a difficult relationship with your own dad, and so on." Her answers respond specificaly to the questions being asked, but the larger message she gives is always the same: Stop thinking about perfection or about assigning blame for falling short of an impossibe ideal; relax; make the most of what you have.

Whether you use Nobody's Perfect to answer a particular question that has been troubling you or to gain perspective on some part of your life or read it purely as human interest entertainment, you will be sure to learn something. This book alone isn't a solution, but it certainly offers extremely useful help. As Dr. Browne concludes, "It's OK to try for perfection as long as you are willing not only to tolerate but also to embrace a lack of it in others as well as in yourself....Perfection is only an abstract goal, so our reach can exceed our grasp and we won't get bored....Besides, if we're perfect, what do we do about chocolate?"

In her new book, Why They Don’t Call When They Say They Will...and Other Missed Signals, she tackles a subject that has been a problem since Eve bit into the apple and Adam got his first clear-eyed glimpse of her. Men and women—will they ever understand each other?

“Men and women breathe the same air, tread the same ground, but beyond that, there are probably more differences than similarities. While both bleed, their reaction to being wounded, and what wounds them, varies as greatly as does what turns them on and off...”

Dr. Browne recognizes that these differences are like an obstacle course in a survivalist camp, and that as we head toward a decade of closer and more permanent relationships, the ability to navigate the course successfully depends more than ever on a clear understanding of who we ourselves are, and a sincere acknowledgment and acceptance that our partner may be different. The age-old contrasts between the sexes are both the joy and the bane of a relationship, and what Dr. Browne helps us do, is eliminate the negative so that we approach each other as appreciative friends rather than as wary enemies. In her brisk, refreshingly contemporary tone, she provides a dating manual for adults, a guide to eliminating misinterpretation, so that the differences between the sexes become traits to cherish rather than to change. Using more than forty common scenarios that often lead to misunderstanding and blame, Dr. Browne shows us how to avoid these areas of contention for the future. For instance, there’s The Phone Game: they meet at a party, he asks for her number and never calls—a familiar situation. She then blames all men for being manipulative when he only meant to be polite. As the days go by and he doesn’t call, she moves from hurt to anger, so that if he ever did phone, he’d be met with hostility. From the Old Flame scenario to Sex Too Soon, from The Marriage Con to Telling All, these and other typical arenas of conflict between today’s men and women are discussed, and then Dr. Browne supplies her useful advice to avoid future problems.

A tongue-in-cheek glossary of male and female definitions for the same word is also included to telescope the unchanging but understandable differences. As Dr. Browne says, “ . . . this is a manual intended for use by relatively sane adults who are looking for a relatively sane relationship, but who don’t seem to have quite gotten the knack yet.”