Women who hunger for more balance in their lives but find Sarah Ban Breathnach's recipes for achieving an "authentic self" unpalatable may find greater sustenance in Elizabeth Perle McKenna's When Work Doesn't Work Anymore. Where Ban Breathnach tries to cool women's overheated lives with a sprinkling of sachets, McKenna delves deep to identify and inspect the "indigestion in [women's] souls." What emerges as the chief gastric villain is a workplace that "makes no allowance for anything to be more important than work."
McKenna, who has been a publisher at three large book houses, argues persuasively that while the workplace has opened...