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A review by rbruehlman
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
2.0
The only way I managed to finish this was by being trapped in an airplane. It's only 240 pages and pretty big font, but it felt like it lasted forever...
Firstly, let's call a spade a spade. This is, effectively, the original self-help book, so it is wildly famous on that merit alone (to its credit!). But it was also the first... meaning if it came out today, would it have been so popular? Nah. There are tons of self-help books out there, and virtually none of them are going to uniquely blow your mind... which gets me to my second point ... I find self-help books pretty boring. This isn't Dale Carnegie's fault. I just should have known better before I picked it up. I'm not sure there was a world in which I would have rated this higher than 3 stars.
But that wasn't really why I gave this book two stars. I mean, kind of. But also--this book is anecdote after anecdote after anecdote (the man loves FDR!) ... and it got really tiring. I think the book actually had some pretty good points in the latter half, but the entire book could have been slimmed down to 1/3 of the size and still driven home those same points and been a much quicker, snappier read. There aren't many points made in the book, but he must give five, ten different stories for each point.
One thing I did think was cool was how much the book showed its age. That sounds like an insult, but it isn't really. Dale Carnegie draws a lot on historical figures from the 1850s to the 1930s. No one would ever realistically use Lincoln or Andrew Carnegie as an inspirational character these days in an anecdote, but people would use JFK, for sure. The people featured in popular culture shift over time. Soon JFK will be anachronistic to cite too, I think.
Firstly, let's call a spade a spade. This is, effectively, the original self-help book, so it is wildly famous on that merit alone (to its credit!). But it was also the first... meaning if it came out today, would it have been so popular? Nah. There are tons of self-help books out there, and virtually none of them are going to uniquely blow your mind... which gets me to my second point ... I find self-help books pretty boring. This isn't Dale Carnegie's fault. I just should have known better before I picked it up. I'm not sure there was a world in which I would have rated this higher than 3 stars.
But that wasn't really why I gave this book two stars. I mean, kind of. But also--this book is anecdote after anecdote after anecdote (the man loves FDR!) ... and it got really tiring. I think the book actually had some pretty good points in the latter half, but the entire book could have been slimmed down to 1/3 of the size and still driven home those same points and been a much quicker, snappier read. There aren't many points made in the book, but he must give five, ten different stories for each point.
One thing I did think was cool was how much the book showed its age. That sounds like an insult, but it isn't really. Dale Carnegie draws a lot on historical figures from the 1850s to the 1930s. No one would ever realistically use Lincoln or Andrew Carnegie as an inspirational character these days in an anecdote, but people would use JFK, for sure. The people featured in popular culture shift over time. Soon JFK will be anachronistic to cite too, I think.