Customer Reviews
Limited scope leaves little to gain - By: Some Bloke, 17 Jul 2006 
I usuallly find books like this leave me impressed with the understanding the writer has of the subject, but I was disappointed & found this book limited.
There were a few useful points early on, but there was a lot of repetition, & I thought the scope of the book was very narrow. Areas I thought wuld be explored as a matter of course were not covered & there seemed to be a large focus on social conversations with people you work with. Perhaps the biggest impression this has left me with is the difference between American & British conversation; samples phrases given as examples were generallly the type seen as cheesy & false by the British but work well in the States. It was hard to read without an American accent in my head.
Essential areas I expected but were not covered included:
Assertiveness
Dealing with confrontation
Persuasive techniques
Calming aggressive people
Getting quiet people to talk
The role & use of open & closed questions
Instead the repetetive returns to social work settings had me flicking back through the book to see if I'd accidentallly put my bookmark in the wrong place & was re-reading an old chapter.
I think this may be useful to people who reallly do have a difficulty in talking to anyone, but to those with limited skills looking to understand conversation better, I would not reccomend this book.
