“Philip Slater is absolutely marvelous. His writings are inevitably loaded with insight, sensitivity, ingenuity. No one plays with ideas and comes up with the sorts of profound observations as he does...Reading Slater is fun; it's an education, an enlightening experience, a supreme pleasure.”

Thomas Cottle, Sociologist, Clinical Psychologist, Author

“Footholds is Philip Slater's most arresting book so far. It is studded with the kinds of insights which result from his exceptionally fresh way of looking at familiar relationships.”

Edgar Z. Friedenberg, American Scholar of Education and Gender Studies

“Penetrating arguments from an astute observer.”

Kirkus Review

“The ‘problem’ of the working mother is often discussed as if the mother’s presence in the home were an unqualified blessing. Child rearing has never been, throughout history, either a full-time or a one-person task, but rather the adjunct of an otherwise full life.”

“Healing, ...in most Western medicine, operates on the assumption that all sickness arises from a defect in the organism. Either something is inside that should not be inside—a germ, a tumor, anxiety, a demon, a poison—or something is not inside that should be inside—vitamins, antibiotics, the soul, analgesics. Treatment consists of putting things in and taking things out. More subtle forms of healing, acupuncture, chiropractic, bioenergetics, are about adjusting internal balances, reacquainting the parts with each other through internal communication. A living structure is one in which the parts communicate. A dead structure is one in which the parts have ceased to communicate.”