An entertaining mix of canny advice and brash inspiration.
Ask in the right way and ye shall receive—raises, discounts, nights out with the boys, you name it—according to this sprightly self-helper.
Williams, a saleswoman and life coach, feels that people aren’t getting what they want because they’re too reticent, shy or fearful of rejection to pipe up and demand it. So she presents this treatise on the theory and practice of making requests, which amounts to a grand tutorial in pointed communication. The author teaches us to suss out the hidden “What’s in It For Me” motivators, from financial gain to altruistic glow, that make others accede to requests. Readers also learn to insinuate positive expectations into the request, to mirror the recipient’s mood and body language, to rationally deflect objections and, if that doesn’t work, to move beyond the realm of reason (“if you feel the tears coming on, let them out!”). We learn the subtle art of the “non-request request,” the very unsubtle art of manipulating a husband into compliance—promise him sex—and a sure-fire trick for taking your plea right to the CEO: tell his screening secretary that “he wouldn’t want anyone else to know why I’m calling.” There’s much practical wisdom here on everything from wringing the best deal out of a car salesman or mortgage lender to asking a motormouth coworker to shut up, but at times there is an over-the-top fervor to the author’s advocacy. Williams tells readers not to feel entitled, but the lengthy sections on retail bargaining tacitly prescribe a lifestyle of relentless wheedling—“Will you accept this expired coupon?”—that borders on recklessness: you should only follow her suggestion to “add to your restaurant experience by making atypical requests” that go “outside the box” if you want to incur the wrath of your food handlers. Still, taken with a pinch of common sense, this is an insightful, insistent how-to guide.
An entertaining mix of canny advice and brash inspiration.Pub Date: April 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0984439409
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Good Day Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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