Eduardo Santiago
A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.
This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.
She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.
A welcome addition to the canon. Much more readable than Supercommunicators and less dated than Nonviolent Communication. Well organized and referenced. Written with compassion, sensitivity, and humor.
This is probably going to become my first-choice recommendation for people waking up to the importance of listening. Even though it was published in 2019, it's well tuned to the problems of 2025: loneliness, attachment theory, cell phones, identity politics, and the importance of silence (both ambient noise and not speaking). I lurrrrved the opening of the last chapter, When to Stop Listening: a pompous blowhard professor mansplains humor to her. I'm quite sure that person is by now aware of this book and his presence in it, and I wonder: is he cringing in shame now, striving to become a better person? Or is he digging his heels in defensively? Because that's really the root of the problem: those who most need this book are the least likely to read it.
She has a Recommended Reading list at the end, books she considers masterpieces of the art of listening, and War and Peace is first on it—a choice that delights me, because I thought the same thing when I read it. Unfortunately, Middlemarch, a book I found insufferable, is also on that list. I will have to grit my teeth and give it another try.