Surely, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door does have a long listing title which I highly doubt could it not be any better than a 3-stars review. I was right...

This book is one hell of a terrible yet terrific read. Yes, terrible yet terrific! Since I have a pathetically poor vocab-choice in order to fully understand what the eff was going on there. For the British writing style has never been my cup of tea. As a matter of truth, I have to say: This book utterly boring to read.

**WARNING** This book talks about manner. And the author's sense of criticism is strong with this one.

It's always been this way, apparently, in so-called polite society. People go out and meet other people, but only so that they can come home again without anyone piercing the veil of their anonymity in the period in between. (p.10.)

All of the times reading, she continued to denounce what is right and wrong between the deference of men (who truly know manners) and men (who mistake it as some sort of intimidating between morality and social bias). As going through its total 216 pages, from the beginning to the end, I have say no to Lynne Truss. A manner is simply manner. Whether or not you keep telling people how to behave in a manner. No one will ever comprehend anyone's definition. And beside, it is a "none-your-business" anyway. The men can only learn when he wants to.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind ... [but] we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners. (Gilbert K. Chesterton)

It can't be denied that the book do have some positive POV which I'm glad of I did with my patience toward the end there. I found some interesting thoughts over the philosophy of manner and a bit of how the society has shifted from different manners to manners during the history.

Manners are about showing consideration, and using empathy, But they are also about being better. Every time a person ask himself, "What would the world be like if everyone did this?" or "I'm not going to calculate the cost to me on this occasion. I'm just going to do the right thing"...

Enjoy!

I'm wavering between a 4 and 5 star. The book is good, though a little short.

I think overwhelmingly she hits the nail on the head, I just wish that she could actually tell us how to do something about it.

Well-written, but ultimately offered nothing.

Yes, the world is rude, and most of us are aware it. I'm not even sure what I expected of this book - part of it was amusing, but it's mostly just an over long rant.
In my own little mind, I suspect the author secretly has a sprung lawn chair, black socks to wear with her sandals, and frequently yells from her front yard "Get off my lawn!"
But I am a bit rude dontchaknow.

Disappointing really, I was hoping for much more from the author of the wonderful Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It's funny in places, but much of it is just a very articulate rant.
Sorry Lynne Truss, I wanted to really like it.

After listening to the same songs over and over again on the radio, Marcia finally convinced me to get an audio book. The author does her own reading and the book is a British, tongue-in-cheek look at rudeness and bad manners. There are some LOL moments but the only downside to this book was that there were no rudeness diffusing techniques.

In essence, Truss rants about rudeness for the same reasons that she does about punctuation: that the lack of good manners and the escalation of rude behavior both signals and contributes to the downfall of society. She makes a good argument for just being nicer to each other, for pity's sake.

Truss covers all varieties of rudeness, from drivers who cut you off on the highway and give you the finger, to loud cell phone conversations on the train, to the endless automated menus you get when you call your bank, to retail clerks who can't be bothered to be pleasant, let alone helpful. She also covers the "Universal Eff Off Reflex", by which any person's response to any sort of criticism is to tell the other person to "Eff Off", rather than considering whether maybe just maybe oneself might have been at fault.

Truss talks about how in modern society we've lost all the social niceties that characterized, say, upper class Victorians, and in a way that's a good thing, because a lot of those "manners" were there to exclude and mark out the lower class people who didn't belong. However, nothing has really replaced those old rules--we don't have a new set of social values to act on. Everybody has their own set of rules they think are correct, and everybody's set of rules is different, and everybody thinks they're right and everyone else is wrong. Everyone disagrees about what constitutes "good manners". Also, Truss argues that people are becoming less aware of each other, and less aware that other people deserve respect, and so don't notice or care when they are rude.

One thing I liked was the following list, which Truss describes as "twenty (mostly lapsed) reasons to show special politeness to other people that have nothing to do with class":

1. they are older
2. they know more than you do
3. they know less than you do
4. they got here first
5. they have educational qualifications in the subject under discussion
6. you are in their house
7. they once helped you financially
8. they have been good to you all your life
9. they are less fortunate than you
10. they have achieved status in the wider world
11. you are serving them in a shop
12. they are in the right
13. they are your boss
14. they work for you
15. they are a policeman/teacher/doctor/judge
16. they are in need
17. they are doing you a favor
18. they paid for the tickets
19. you phoned them, not the other way around
20. they have a menial job

For me personally, I am courteous in the vast majority of situations on that list just by instinct. Clearly my mama raised me right. It comes as a shock to me that (for example) someone would not be polite to a person who had been kind to them all their life. I have always been horrified to hear stories of people being rude to someone while in that person's house, or after that person had bought the tickets, or to someone who's doing them a favor. I think one of the scariest aspects of those situations is that the rude person has no idea that he's being rude, and it's rude to tell him so, and he'd tell you to Eff Off if you did, so in essence you're helpless. I find that really horrifying. I think it's really sad that Trus needed to make a list of these reasons to be polite to others. I thought it was an interesting and useful list, and that we can all use some reminding to be kind to the people on that list.

Truss is remarkably funny and sharp in her writing. As in her earlier book, she is also extremely British, and focuses on the British specifics of the problem, but I'm okay with that because most of what she writes is completely applicable to Americans as well, and also because it's such fun to read her.

Lynne Truss never fails to delight.

Her Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, was a much needed voice crying out in a wilderness of illiteracy for restoration of the small but necessary tools of the writer's art, the symbols of punctuation, and their necessary placement in sentences and paragraphs, in a way that was both highly literate and funny. In Talk to the Hand, she takes on the rapid deterioration of civil society, and proves to be a most formidable antagonist against the barbarian hordes that have become so much of society today. "Talk to the hand, 'cause the face ain't listening," the saying goes. "When did the world stop wanting to hear? When did society stop valuing basic courtesy and respect? Taking on the boorish behavior that for some has become a point of pride, Talk to the Hand is a rallying cry for civility." (From the front jacket blurb)

In a recent U.S. survey, a whopping 79% of adults said that lack of courtesy was a serious problem. That makes for a majority of responsible citizens fed up with antisocial behavior, but suffering in silence. Why the silence?

Since the opening decades of the 20th century, Western society has become more and more narcissistic, less and less aware of the value of the social good to the individual, increasingly hungry for all the goodies with none of the responsibilities. The media don't just passively report on the breakdown of civil society that this has engendered, but actively encourage that breakdown, promoting music, videos, products, and behavior that aren't just hedonistic, but actually aggressively opposed to everything that civil society once stood for. Too many children are encourged by both their own parents and the media to think of their parents as their pals and the world as their entitlement, scot-free, and have no realistic assessment of either their nation's history and roots or their own prospects in life. Second Life, the virtual-reality online world, has become the apotheosis of the sort of aspirations those children acquire growing up: a way to be anything you can be, do anything you want to do, without fear of permanent consequences -- and nevermind that oh, yes, there are serious consequences to some of the more outrageous on- and offline shenanigans that some members of Second Life get up, such as the trifling offenses of felony theft and murder. That sort of attitude may or may not have something to do with the social syndrome which psychoanalyst James Hill nailed in his We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, that of growing numbers of adults being encouraged by psychotherapists to get in touch with their inner children at the expensive of their inner babysitter, to cultivate mental navel-gazing as the be-all and end-all of wisdom and maturity, but there's a suspicious similarity between the two, isn't there?

At any rate, increasingly what used to be bedrock values of Western civilization are being thrown to the winds. In just four short decades or so, chastity has gone from treasure to dirty word to ho-hum. Murder has become commonplace in many cities and too many suburbs -- the death by fire of a homeless person at the hands of bored, upper-middle class teenagers has become all too common, and many of those teenagers will be back on the streets before they leave early middle age. Theft, especially identity theft, has increased exponentially. And on top of everything, exquistely cruel rudeness has become a prized weapon in an ongoing war by everyone against everyone, or so it seems. When manners go out the window, so do other, more precious things, such as the value placed on life, and respect for another's property.

Maybe I'm overdoing it, but Lynne Truss isn't. One of the things she describes is the way in which our marvelous new electronic toys have made life more and more miserable for just about everybody. Try talking to a human being when you call a company's customer service department -- just try. Wading through nested levels of phone-menu options to get to the department you want is an exhaustive process that can literally take up hours of your day. "Get human" lists of phone numbers posted on the Web from time to time, 800- and other telephone numbers you can use to connect directly with real life people in a company, are precious. Companies keep changing their phone numbers to circumvent those lists, too, because they want people to use their hellishly complex automated phone systems so they don't have to pay somebody to actually talk directly to customers.

Then there's software. Especially software platforms such as Windows. Ever notice that every time Windows gets an upgrade, it also becomes clunkier and glitchier and more prone to drive you crazy trying to cope with it than ever before? We could expand this list indefinitely, but the point is that every day, people are having to deal with more and more pointless, stupid frustrations and obstacles in every aspect of their lives, and it is not doing anything good to our already tattered, battered society -- not to mention our individual minds. Unless something happens to reverse this descent into utter barbarism and sheer black madness, we are going to lose our civilization and everything it provides for us. n  Talk to the Handn points out dozens of hot spots in today's social War on Everyone by Everyone. It's up to the rest of us to go fight the fires and do what we can to reclaim our heritage.

Amusing at times, but tiresome by the end.

Lynne Truss has an acerbic wit and is a most entertaining writer. Her style is so clever, incisive and sophisticated that (especially when reading late at night) one can lose the thread of the argument she's developing. What does comes home in this book is that 'rudeness is bad and manners are good' although this is not how it plays out in public life today. Truss makes a plea for universal kindness and actions for the common good. 3,5

I loved this book! I'll write a proper review soon! Fantastic read!

One of my favorite parts of this book is the authors list of reasons to show special politeness to other people that have nothing to do with class. Here's the list -

1 they are older
2 they know more than you do
3 they know less than you do
4 they got here first
5 they have educational qualifications in the subject under consideration
6 you are in their house
7 they once helped you financially
8 they have been good to you all your life
9 they are less fortunate than you
10 they have achieved status in the wider world
11 you are serving them in a shop
12 they are in the right
13 they are your boss
14 they work for you
15 they are a policeman/teacher/Doctor/judge
16 they are in need
17 they are doing you a favor
18 they paid for the tickets
19 you phoned them, not the other way around
20 they have a menial job

Words to live by, I say!

A lot of the book is really funny too. I agree with a lot of her pet peeves. I think most people will enjoy this book! I recommend it highly and I plan to read other books by Lynne Truss.

As much as I enjoyed Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, I found this book a bit disappointing. To be honest, I found myself nodding more than a few times as she astutely pointed out some lack of manners and general lack of civility that can easily be found in today's society. But as another reader stated, I read 202 pages without really getting the point she was trying to make, other than Eff Off!

Truss does have an easy to read, practical and down to earth writing style that I usually enjoy. However, it was too much truth and not enough entertainment for my liking.

Overall, it was a fair read, but I could have read several other books that I would have enjoyed more thoroughly. While Truss was absolutely right with everything she said, the book didn't entertain me very much. Read it if you have an interest in the subject, pass if you are reading it because you enjoyed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as you will be disappointed. I agree with another reviewer who said that it it had not been for the success of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, this book may not have been printed. The best part for me was that I bought it used for less than half the cover price, so it was worth the risk. Oh, well, Back to my reading pile... Sorry, Lynne! How do you feel now that 13 years have gone by since this was first published?