A sharp and informative guide to communication.
A distinguished actor and communication expert shows how to avoid “the snags of misunderstanding” that plague verbal interactions between human beings.
When Alda (Things I Overhead While Talking to Myself, 2007, etc.) first began hosting the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers in 1993, he had no idea how much the job would change his life. In the 20 years that followed, he developed an enduring fascination with “trying to figure out what makes communication work.” As a TV show host who interviewed scientists and engineers, Alda became painfully aware of his own shortcomings as a communicator and how his background as an actor could help him improve. In the first section of the book, he discusses how effective communication requires listening with ears, eyes, and feelings wide open. Drawing from research, interactions with science professionals, and his work as an actor, Alda reveals how individuals who aren’t “naturally good” communicators can learn to become more adept by practicing their overall relating skills. He describes activities like the “mirror exercise,” in which partners observe and mimic each other’s actions and speech. Not only do people learn how to focus on each other, but they also “strengthen cohesion and promote cooperation” in groups. In the second section, Alda, who founded the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, points out the importance of empathy in communication. He discusses, among others, an exercise that forced him to name the feelings he saw others express. Raising awareness of emotion increases empathy levels, which can trigger the release of oxytocin, the feel-good “love hormone.” By adding emotion to communication, using storytelling, avoiding jargon, and eliminating the assumption that others share the same knowledge base, message senders can forge closer bonds with recipients. The book’s major strength comes from Alda’s choice to take an interprofessional approach and avoid offering prescriptive methods to enhance interpersonal understanding. As he writes, communication “is a dance we learn by trusting ourselves to take the leap, not by mechanically following a set of rules.”
A sharp and informative guide to communication.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8914-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
An often interesting and provocative—though sometimes obvious and, finally, unconvincing—historical exploration of humanity's relationship to machines. Mazlish (History/MIT; The Meaning of Karl Marx, 1984, etc.) says that the three great shocks to our conception of ourselves- -with each shock forcing us to relinquish another claim to uniqueness—have been the Copernican Revolution, removing Earth from its centrality; Darwin's placement of humanity within the animal kingdom; and Freud's excavation of the unconscious. Now, claims the author, ``we are now coming to realize that humans are not as privileged in regard to machines as has been unthinkingly assumed''—and thus the ``fourth discontinuity,'' between ourselves and machines, is eliminated. That people and machines have coevolved, each shaping the other, is demonstrable; that they are of the same essential nature is an idea that seems, at least as treated here, destined to remain a metaphor. To support his claim, Mazlish surveys an eclectic intellectual history, including a chronicle of automata, from the Jewish golem to Vaucanson's duck (once the talk of 18th-century Paris, said to have ``drank, ate, digested, cackled and swam'') to Blade Runner; the intellectual response to the Industrial Revolution; the work of Linnaeus and Darwin; the research of Freud and Pavlov, revealing mechanistic aspects of behavior; Babbage's Difference Engine, turning the power of machines to intellectual tasks, as well as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, which depicted machines in revolt; and the two revolutions of our own age—the coming of computers and of biogenetic technology. Too flat and meandering to germinate something as vital as a reassessment of the humanity/machine symbiosis. (For a more expansive and engaging treatment of a similar theme, see Gregory Stock's Metaman, reviewed below.) (Twelve illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-300-05411-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
Mud-slinging exposÇ of the notorious pop guru who ``got it''- -and then tried to give it to the rest of the world. As his title makes clear, Pressman (a former writer for California Lawyer) makes no pretense to objectivity here: His Werner Erhard is a charismatic but abusive con man with a genius for repackaging and marketing others' ideas. Erhard, he tells us, was born in 1935 Pennsylvania as ``Jack Rosenberg''; grew up to be a married car-salesman with kids; fell in love and remarried, committing bigamy; changed his name to Werner Erhard; and moved with his new wife to California. There, while selling encyclopedias door-to-door, Erhard hooked up with Scientology and a teaching method called Mind Dynamics, then broke away to begin est. Within two years, est had expanded into a multimillion-dollar business whose confrontational, allegedly transformational, techniques had been sold to tens of thousands, including many celebrities. Pressman highlights est's little-known debt to Scientology and Mind Dynamics; traces the outfit's byzantine, perhaps shady, financial structure; emphasizes Erhard's sybaritic way of life and cult of personality; and hammers home the guru's bullying side—which, at its ugliest, may have led him to beat his wife and molest his daughters. What the author dramatically fails to provide by bearing down on the negative (to the extent that nearly all his informants denounce est and its founder) is any real understanding of est's teachings—and of why they appealed so deeply to so many. Today, Erhard, escaping bad publicity, is in exile, his whereabouts apparently unknown to the press, including Pressman: a suitably shadowy stage in the life of a man who remains an enigma despite a dogged telling here of what, surely, is only half the story.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09296-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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