review 1: I disliked this book a lot. I picked it up on a whim, thinking it would help me get rid of some of my social awkwardness. This book didn't affect my social skills at all. "A Good Talk: The Story And Skill of Conversation" is filled with nothing but cheap jokes and common sense situation events, like proof reading an email before punching the, 'Send' button.This would have been a decent book if it wasn't for the confusing writing style. Daniel Menaker kept jumping from topic to topic and throwing in unnecessary jokes. His writing style is very distracting and personally, I don't think his words flowed smoothly. This is the first book I have disliked in a long time, and I am glad to see I am not alone. review 2: i'm still kind of shocked by how disappointing this... more book was. it is such a strange situation because it is a fascinating subject and i was so looking forward to reading about it. it is clear that the writer is extremely knowledgeable and he seems like a nice person who is genuinely interested in what makes conversations good. the problem is that the book is ultimately so poorly written that it doesn't do its subject matter or the writer's passion justice.one of the most obvious and strange problems is that he chose to use a transcribed conversation to illustrate some points. but not only was this very, very long, taking up a significant portion of the text but the conversation itself wasn't particularly interesting to "listen" to. most bizarre of all- the conversation was between himself and another writer. he defended his decision to highlight one of his own conversations by pointing out that every other attempt at recording two random talkers failed. but i found it to be just inappropriate and thought he really should have kept trying so that he could more objectively analyze a conversation.in addition to very regular name-dropping throughout the book he seems to try way too hard to be funny and both of these practices had the result of being quite distracting and made me feel like he was more concerned with trying to impress readers instead of just writing about his subject. i kept finding myself wishing he would just give the reader the interesting information and insight i knew he possessed. less
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