Did you live in the US at any point from 1978-2011? If so, you may remember Andy Rooney, the much-lampooned commenter on “60 Minutes.” His monologues usually started with “Did you ever…?” He would then go on to whine about something he’d noticed and not liked.

Lynne Truss wrote a great first book (“Eats, Shoots & Leaves”) that sold so well that she could likely have taken the rest of her life off from working. Reading this, I wished she had. She managed to be an even grumpier Rooney. Painful.

And I was left with the question, “If the world is do full of awfulness, powerful person, what are you doing about it?”

Quick-reading humorous take on a situation that is really quite sad. Reading it almost 10 years after it was written, and at this particularly ugly point in history (I'm in the USA) it is actually in many ways a heart-breaker.
Anyway, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Take that as you will.
However...
Wouldn't it be fun if this book were Required Reading? :-)

This was an interesting read for the most part. It isn't really a book of advice, more a reflection on the state of manners in society, with focus largely on the western world (the United Kingdom and United States of America in particular). I definitely saw some relatable points. It isn't a book I would immediately recommend, but I also wouldn't tell people not to read it. In general the pacing and structure was not too bad, but at times I wished there had been a better breakdown of the chapters into smaller sections/better places to stop within each chapter.
I was torn between giving a 3 and a 4. Realistically it would be a 3.5, but I'm going to round up.

For hundreds of years, we have had books on manners. The subject preoccupies us. What is acceptable behaviour? After how long should you write your thankyou note? What sort of wedding gift is appropriate for the second marriage of a widowed ex-hermit, twelfth in line to the throne, whose fiancée is set to inherit all of Wiltshire south of Devizes?

Talk to the Hand is not a book about manners or etiquette. It is about the rudeness of the modern world, and the sense of outrage that infects us every day as we discover that other people are – generally speaking – crass, selfish, and inconsiderate. That man just dropped a cigarette packet on the floor. Should you do anything? You say to the shop assistant, “Can you tell me the price of this? There doesn’t appear to be a label,” and she says, “What do you think I am, psychic?” In her follow-up to Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynn Truss asks why rudeness is a universal flashpoint and examines specific sources of affront.
Whatever happened to “please” and “thank you”? Why does the customer have to do all the work? Why do people behave in public as if they are in private? Whatever happened to the idea of publicspiritedness?

It’s a big rant, essentially. But on the plus side, it’s quite short and has virtually no hard facts to detain the reader or slow the argument. Potential readers are advised that there is nothing about pandas or punctuation in this book, and that anyone scouring the text for grammatical errors will be considered a bit of a bore. Is that a rude thing to say? As always, it isn’t easy to be categorical.

This book is quite funny in a dry, witty manner and Truss touches on many subjects that resonated with me because these are things irritate me too. But after a while her argument starts to lose steam and in the end she doesn't really have a solution or a point to make. But it's still a very amusing read.

After witnessing a congressman shout out "You lie" to a sitting US president on the news, a rapper rudely interrupt another singer's acceptance award, various sports figures acting childishly, this book is a breath of fresh air. It confirms that not all of us in today's society accept the common rudeness so commonly displayed in this day and age.

This book is also a fun read, much like Ms. Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves". It's a fast read and not easily put down! Though it's not a "manners" book, it does contain much common sense on how we should treat other people. Something that should be so common but unfortunately is not: "Treat others as you'd like to be treated" is the main theme of this book.

Good light-hearted review of modern day rudeness, some good funny anecdotal visions on life, past and present.

Very entertaining and thought provoking. I bought this book from a place that sells used books in Maryland four years ago, but I couldn't manage to read it until this week. The writer complains how people have become too rude in the British society. My dear Miss Truss, thank God you don't live in this region, you wouldn't have survived a couple of hours since your arrival at Cairo Airport.

It's a pleasant read, but you're not going to learn anything in particular. It's mostly the author ranting about the lack of manners (which I agree with!) in an often humorous manner. She can be very funny. But ultimately it's more on the order of reading an enjoyable blog, than it is a magnificent book.

And ... as I got nearer the end ... I realised I'd read it before, (and before I started cataloguing all my reads on Goodreads). So ultimately it was unmemorable as well.

But I did enjoy it, so there's that.

If you really want to read up on manners (and maybe improve your own), my favourite by far is Miss Manners. She explains that manners isn't about which fork to use, it's about making people feel comfortable. Well, we should all want that! She has such easy-to-follow rules, like "if they can fix it, then tell them," so you mention that their fly is currently open ... but you wouldn't mention that their fly was open throughout their entire speech last night. And she's also extremely funny, and equally good-natured.

(5* = amazing, terrific book, one of my all-time favourites, 4* = very good book, 3* = good book, but nothing to particularly rave about, 2* = disappointing book, and 1* = awful, just awful. As a statistician I know most books are 3s, but I am biased in my selection and end up mostly with 4s, thank goodness.)

(5* = amazing, terrific book, one of my all-time favourites, 4* = very good book, 3* = good book, but nothing to particularly rave about, 2* = disappointing book, and 1* = awful, just awful. As a statistician I know most books are 3s, but I am biased in my selection and end up mostly with 4s, thank goodness.)

Best buck I ever spent! Literally, this book cost me a dollar at Family Dollar in Providence (hurry and get a copy!). As I was flipping through it out of curiosity, a few things caught my eye so I figured that for a dollar I couldn't really go wrong.

This book has it all. It is hilarious, laugh out loud funny--mainly, I believe, because the author is British and Brits have such a way with words. It's also insightful, revealing, and thought-provoking. I found myself at once relieved to hear from someone who was bugged by the same things as myself, and depressed at the current prevalent disregard for common decency.

**Warning** There is quite a little bit of swearing, and a plethora of "Eff Off" quotes and references. Sadly, it is necessary in the context of the book. I did feel it got slightly out of hand, but for the most part it gave me even more pause to think and reflect on myself and the societal psyche.

This book also gave me a new word: solipsistic.

What it really boils down to is that there is a difference between "etiquette" and "courtesy" and there are MORAL implications to manners. Here is my favorite paragraph of the book:

"Manners never were enforceable, in any case. Indeed, for many philosophers, this is regarded as their chief value: that they are voluntary. In 1912, the jurist John Fletcher Moulton claimed in a landmark speech that the greatness of a nation resided not in its obedience to laws, but in its abiding by conventions that were not obligatory. 'Obedience to the unenforceable' was the phrase that was picked up by other writers--and it leads us to the most important aspect of manners: their philosophical elusiveness. Is there a clear moral dimension to manners? Can you equate civility and virtue? My own answer would be yes, despite all the famous counter-examples of blood-stained dictators who had exquisite table manners and never used their mobile phone in a crowded train compartment to order mass executions. It seems to me that, just as the loss of punctuation signalled the vast and under-acknowledged problem of illiteracy, so the collapse of manners stands for a vast and under-acknowledged problem of social immorality. Manners are based on an ideal of empathy, of imagining the impact of one's own actions on others. They involve doing something for the sake of other people that is not obligatory and attracts no reward. In the current climate of unrestrained solipsistic and aggressive self-interest, you can equate good manners not only with virtue but with positive heroism."

Not nearly as enjoyable as ‘E, S n L’ but there is a bit of a wild sense of outrage at the state of public discourse that author discerned two decades prior to me! Definitely told from oblique British perspective, if that isn’t your cup of tea, then don’t bother.

pretty funny- ugh, the changes in our world regarding manners / civility / rudeness... call me old-fashioned. I like real mail, thank-you notes and when someone holds the door open for me. Not to mention, just say: Please & Thank you!

Skimmed the book for a research project involving books on etiquette. After reading many books for this project, this one lands solidly in my least favorite ones. Author thinks it's acceptable to use autistic as a slur (completely unrelated to the actual neurological definition) and spends a few hundred pages griping about how absolutely terrible everyone else behaves yet also makes time to complain about people with "posh" manners, how she doesn't think "political correctness" has anything to do with respect, and how much she dislikes random acts of kindness and Amelie of all things.
If this weren't a library copy, I'd be tempted to set it on fire or tear it apart. And I don't even like it when people do that kind of thing to books for art.