Whether they’ve read John Gray’s books or not, everyone 'knows' by now that women and men communicate differently. Women talk more than men and they are more verbally skilled; men talk in order to get things done while women talk in order to make connections to people; men use language competitively while women use it cooperatively. These differences mean that men and women struggle to understand each other, and need help to communicate. And, according to recent books by Simon Baron Cohen and others, these differences are based not on the way we are brought up, but on differences in our brains; it’s the way we were made.

Or is it? In this excellent book, Cameron, an Oxford language professor, examines the evidence behind these beliefs and finds it seriously lacking.

It is not often in reading a youth work book that I find myself unable to put it down and making a mental list of all those youth workers that I need to urge to read it. But this is one of those books. The sheer naked honesty and humility of Mark Yaconelli's reflection on his failings and failures is refreshing and challenging. His candour allows the reader to drop all guards and listen openly to Mark's stark appraisal of youth work. Yaconelli highlights every youth worker's tendency to busyness and overwork not only as bad for practitioners but for the nature of the work itself.