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A review by bootman
Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication by Fred Dust
5.0
Sweet Jesus. I would have rather read a book on the pseudoscientific topic of body language reading. After finishing this book, I’m just extremely grateful that I didn’t buy it because it was available through my library app. This book is just anecdotal evidence from cover to cover, and the author has made an extremely good living doing what many entrepreneurs do, which is selling BS to large companies and governments.
In short, the author was an architect and then realized he could make money teaching people how to have conversations. Then, throughout the book he gives a ton of activities and extremely weird recommendations to make conversations better in the work place. The way you can spot BS books like this is that they say everything is bad and everything is good, and then they try to provide some ridiculous nuance explaining why X is good in Y situation but not Z situation.
For example, knitting can help you be a better listener in meetings but random thing X will make you worse. Why? Just because.
This was a ridiculous book, and I think what bummed me out the most is that the author is a married gay man, and I expected him to cover some more heavy topics. Finally, at the end he discusses how to have some more difficult conversations, but like the rest of the book, they’re silly, non-scientific recommendations.
Do I recommend this book? Only if you’re a masochist like myself who enjoys binging terrible books to see what dumb thing the author says next.
In short, the author was an architect and then realized he could make money teaching people how to have conversations. Then, throughout the book he gives a ton of activities and extremely weird recommendations to make conversations better in the work place. The way you can spot BS books like this is that they say everything is bad and everything is good, and then they try to provide some ridiculous nuance explaining why X is good in Y situation but not Z situation.
For example, knitting can help you be a better listener in meetings but random thing X will make you worse. Why? Just because.
This was a ridiculous book, and I think what bummed me out the most is that the author is a married gay man, and I expected him to cover some more heavy topics. Finally, at the end he discusses how to have some more difficult conversations, but like the rest of the book, they’re silly, non-scientific recommendations.
Do I recommend this book? Only if you’re a masochist like myself who enjoys binging terrible books to see what dumb thing the author says next.