Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist's sensibilities. -Of course everything I come up with, - he says, -novelists have known beforehand.-

These twenty-three interviews selected from hundreds that Coles has given disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in pediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless.

In focusing on a man known mainly as an eminent psychiatrist and author of The Spiritual Life of Children and more than fifty other books, this collection is a departure from the other books in the...