cover image Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable

Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable

Lillian Glass. Simon & Schuster, $21.5 (283pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80315-9

Certain people seem to exist to make us miserable. Glass, a California ``communications expert,'' terms these terrors Toxic People and identifies 30 types, some with humorous labels such as the Smiling Two-Faced Sneaky Back-Stabber and the Eddie Haskell. She provides a Toxic People Quiz to help readers identify which category a suspect toxic terror falls into and suggests 10 techniques to handle these folk: Humor, Direct Confront, Calm Questioning, Give-Them-Hell-and-Yell, Love and Kindness, Vicarious Fantasy, etc. And since we're all toxic, to some degree, a section on Toxic Comments and a Toxic Image Inventory are offered to help readers identify their own destructive behaviors. While the book doesn't rise above pop psychology, it is entertaining. Author tour. (May)