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A review by hflh
You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
informative
reflective
fast-paced
2.0
There is some interesting stuff here - about 7-12% for me. The rest was musings that felt redundant and drawn out. There is a lot of "the internet is ruining everything" and "we're so politically divided nowadays and should listen to other opinions more", which are fine points to make, but Murphy makes them repeatedly and with little nuance.
Murphy makes a lot of broad, bold claims without backing them up and uses research to support her arguments when the data isn't really there (see final comment for an example). I loved the use of interviews and other's experiences as evidence, but I question the credibility of someone that presents examples from a scripted radio show as if they are real, experiential evidence. I guess this is to be expected from a pop-psych book but, after hearing Murphy talk about how good a listener she is from her years of journalism, I was expecting better reporting on facts.
The introductory chapters present some ableist ideas on communication (that are also just ignorant of different communication styles across culture), but the remainder of the book had much less of this.
For example, Murphy cites research that found deaf schoolchildren struggled to identify emotions more than their hearing peers, implying that the children developed empathy slower because they couldn't hear and not because—maybe—they had less opportunities for social development or were not as attuned to hearing-culture norms because they were isolated from their hearing peers??
Murphy makes a lot of broad, bold claims without backing them up and uses research to support her arguments when the data isn't really there (see final comment for an example). I loved the use of interviews and other's experiences as evidence, but I question the credibility of someone that presents examples from a scripted radio show as if they are real, experiential evidence. I guess this is to be expected from a pop-psych book but, after hearing Murphy talk about how good a listener she is from her years of journalism, I was expecting better reporting on facts.
The introductory chapters present some ableist ideas on communication (that are also just ignorant of different communication styles across culture), but the remainder of the book had much less of this.
For example, Murphy cites research that found deaf schoolchildren struggled to identify emotions more than their hearing peers, implying that the children developed empathy slower because they couldn't hear and not because—maybe—they had less opportunities for social development or were not as attuned to hearing-culture norms because they were isolated from their hearing peers??
Content Warnings
Minor: Ableism