Book Club

Sun., March 21, 1999

Name: No name.

City: Spokane.

Group history: Group of 12 women, which has been together for six years, remains nameless. Meets six to eight times a year, on whatever night is convenient, alternating between members’ houses. Host typically serves dessert or light snack. Group reads blend of fiction, nonfiction, with each selection “presented” by a pre-determined member.

Book reviewed: “Emotional Intelligence” (Bantam Books, 352 pages, $13.95) by Daniel P. Goleman.

Group representative: Betsy Coombs.

The review: Goleman’s book questions the way we look at and measure intelligence. Instead of IQ, which Goleman considers a too-narrow perspective, he considers “emotional intelligence” - which he defines as an individual’s overall sense of self-awareness and capacity for such virtues as motivation, empathy and willingness to love - to be a better gauge of a person’s ability to achieve success. “We talked about the concepts, the things that he presented in the book,” Coombs says. “We kind of batted them around, whether we thought they were valid and how they related to us and did we agree with them.” The verdict? “We thought there was a lot of validity to it. And people pulled a lot of things out of it that I thought were valuable.”

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