Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worth purchasing for the relationship section, otherwise mediocre.
Comment: Helen Palmer is well-respected author in the Enneagram world. However, I don't personally find her to be one of the best in terms of accuracy, lucidity and covering a lot of ground in a short amount of space. A lot of the information in her books can be found elsewhere and I find these other descriptions of the types more true to life. Other people find Helen Palmer easier to read, so everyone reading this is aware of my bias.
Personally, I think the best introduction to the Enneagram available is "The Wisdom of the Enneagram" by Riso and Hudson. However, this book has something that their book does not, an excellent section on how each of the types relates to each other in work and love relationships. When you combine this with good introductions on each type, you get a winning combination for those people who want a simple introduction with this extra value added material.
If you are looking for depth, then Sandra Maitri's "The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram" is also excellent and dives quite deeply into each type from a more spiritual perspective. She bases her work on Almaas and in my opinion does a much better job than he does in bringing his concepts to life. Sandra Maitri can have a dark tone, but the Enneagram is really about shadow work or the different ways one can be an ego. Helen Palmer is more upbeat, but she is still honest about the shortcomings of each type.
If your interest in the Enneagram is casual, this is a good choice if you are only going to buy one book and you want it to cover relationships. If you want a better general introduction, go with Riso and Hudson "The Wisdom of the Enneagram."
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Relationship Books of All Time
Comment: I was never one for long reviews...but there are only a few books that are a MUST for your library and this is one of them.
And when you get to "your" section, you will think someone knows your inner most secrets as you quickly look around the room to see who must be monitoring your every move.
And, every few years you'll find yourself re-reading it all over again. Great reference book, great insight, and can not only help you deal with that difficult relationship at work (or home), but better understand what makes YOU tick so you can grow personally.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I was astounded...
Comment: I borrowed this book from an instructor who was teaching the Enneagram to a small group of interested people. When I read the chapter on 4's I was amazed at the accuracy of the personality "type" to my own. It felt as if a clinical psychologist had followed me though my emotional and traumatic years and recorded all of my triumphs and tribulations in a concise, analytical manner. Better still, it explained why my instincts to react were so different from those around me. I learned to see that people have very different motivations than my own which meant that I needed to realize that I could not change them but I could now appreciate why they saw things in other ways.As an added benefit I learned to understand (and accept) more about myself through Helen Palmer's book than I had through many years of professional psychogical therapy. Wish I had this knowledge 20 years ago. It would have saved me a lot of money.
The sheer simplicity of the book lends itself to the everyday language in which it was written. There is none of the false pretentiousness present in many of the books that share similar self-help messages. However, it does not feel as if it were written to stoop to the lowest common denominator either.
It should be noted that Palmer emphatically states that no-one should presume to "type" others as a method in which to judge what personality is most compatible to one's own purpose. As with any personality profiling there is the inevitable dilution of the original message that leads to generalizations and oversimplification.
My personal assessment is that the book is an easy and fascinating read for anyone wishing to better understand human behavior and interactions. I highly and heartily recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enneagram in Love and Work
Comment: Excellent book. Improves your interations with others by providing insight into others' perspectives. I've bought numerous copies of this particular version for friends and co-workers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Application of enneagram in work and love-interesting study
Comment: While many books on the Enneagram have been published, Helen Palmer has done one where the Enneagram is applied against the the dynamics of relationships and the workplace. Palmer first gives a synopsis of the nine types . However, she gives different names of the types, different from Riso, although the focus of attention each types corresponds to Riso's analysis. I've listed Palmer's designation, followed by Riso's, and on the whole, I like Palmer's designations better, with the capital vice and antidote to each type.
1 Perfectionist, Reformer, anger, meekness
2 Giver, Helper, pride, humility
3 Performer, Motivator, [deceit], [truthfulness]
4 Romantic, Individualist, envy, charity
5 Observer, Investigator, avarice, poverty
6 Trooper, Loyalist, [fear], [courage]
7 Epicure, Enthusiast, gluttony, abstinence
8 Boss, Leader, lust, chastity
9 Mediator, Peacemaker, sloth, zeal
Like Riso, she covers George Gurdjieff, who pioneered the Enneagram in the West, but here's a fresh spin. She takes Dante's areas of Purgatory and Geoffrey Chaucer's virtue listed in The Parson's Tale. Each type is characterized by a certain passion, or a capital vice, and Chaucer's virtue is an antidote to that. The brackets above indicate that they are designations from Oscar Ichazo, who further developed the virtues. Palmer then uses Gurdjieff's centers of intelligence (mental, emotional, and body-based) to identify the focus of attention on each group. For a four, it's melancholy on the mental, envy on the emotional, and competition, shame, and recklessness on the body-based.
Palmer then covers each type in terms of worldview, spiritual path, concerns, personality bias, subtype focus, focal issues, security and risk, intimacy, positive and negative signals, leadership style, conflicts, conflict resolution, employee participation, and team building. In particular, I like the brief sentences used to describe the worldview. In my case, a Type 4, it is "Something is missing. Others have it. I have been abandoned." The sense of shame on feeling unworthy proceeds from that feeling that something is missing.
She does use Riso's dynamics for change in each group using the 142857 cycle. For example, a secure Type 4 shifts to a Type 1 on a positive, but an insecure Type 4 slides down to a Type 2.
Finally, Palmer creates a directory of relationships, love and workplace, playing each type against each other, e.g. 1's with 5's, 4's with 8's, etc. However, she steps away from Keirsey's notion that one type is optimal with another type, i.e. Rationals with Idealists, stating, "It would be a mistake, therefore, to categorize types according to compatibility or incompatibility. Your best match in intimacy and team building is actually any psychologically mature person."
As director of the Center for Enneagram Studies, and having written The Enneagram and The Pocket Enneagram, Helen Palmer is ideally placed to write this book.
