A review by zade
Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners by Henry Alford

3.0

I didn’t love this book. It’s not a “Miss Manners”-type guide, more of a series of reflections on how modern manners have changed and what the point is of manners in the first place. Alford is engaging and seems like a neat fellow—the kind of guy you could go just about anywhere with and he’d make it fun. A lot of what he writes about, though, has little or no application in the lives of people outside the creative NYC scene. What really got me, what made me decide to give the book room on my shelf was this line:

Manners columns…reassure me and console me by suggesting that life’s ragged edges can be made smooth, that there’s never not an answer to even the most challenging question. They’re finite, and devoid of the hundreds of extenuating circumstances that make the solving of my own or my friends’ problems so complicated. (177)