A review by catherin9
The Definitive Book of Body Language: The Hidden Meaning Behind People's Gestures and Expressions by Barbara Pease, Allan Pease

3.0

I found the content to be pretty hit or miss. The authors make a lot of generalizations that are sexist and optimized for more formal, hierarchical organizations. As a female at a tech company, a good portion of the book was irrelevant. As such, I found a lot of their conclusions given a set of body cues to be oversimplified and misleading.

That said, their focus on how different actions may be interpreted made me think more about how I present myself and how I can communicate most effectively. As my first foray into body language, this book gave me a set of tools to better decode and intuit people in complex situations and I found their grounding of some behaviors in evolution fascinating and an interesting way to think about our natural behavior.