Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

This is one of the great classics of the self-help genre, and as I such, I thought I'd whizz through it and see what it had to offer.

There are some pieces of advice that have now become ingrained in popular, well-known advice - things like 'Smile!' and 'begin criticism with praise and honest appreciation' and 'try to see it from the other person's point of view'. There are pieces of advice that make you cringe, particularly when they are expanded through an 'and this is how you can increase your sales!' anecdote. And there is some stuff there that is genuinely helpful and interesting to read again (particularly the parts about never being able to win an argument and not being able to change people's minds by just telling them that they're wrong - things I remember on some occasions and not others).

There are big problems with the advice given, of course. Carnegie is writing from a position of privilege, and this is very much in the tradition of 'if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you will be a Successful Man' advice, which of course completely ignores things like systemic racism and sexism, and assumes that you can get whereever you want through the virtues of Hard Work. There's also a worrying orientalising element, in that Chinese proverbs by those wise oriental folk are often quoted in problematic ways. That said, this was written in 1932 or thereabouts, and this sort of thing wasn't really high up in the public consciousness at the time.

So if you are curious about where some of this kind of thing began, and where some of these concepts came into society's view of the world, this is quite an interesting place to start. Don't expect to get too much out of it that you wouldn't get from other, more modern books, mind - especially since the psychological science upon which a lot of it rests is now rather dated.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I didn't realise it was as old as that - I had assumed it was something that came out of the enterprising new world of the 1960s. Interesting write-up, anyway.

[med_cat]

Hm...an interesting perspective :) Much of the advice in the book is still valuable, though ;) But you're right about the other problems...not something I've thought about.

Thank you for a thought-provoking review,
Cat

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

This is my mother's favourite book of all time. She still quotes it to me incessantly, and therefore I grew up with much of its maxims ingrained into my subconscious and consciousness...