Book Review: People Skills

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: People Skills


Author: Robert Bolton

Date: 1979

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

ISBN: 0-671-62248-X

Length: 295 pages of text including footnotes, plus index

Quote: "One of the problems of trying to learn communication skills from a book's printed page is that the vocal quality is missing."

That's on page 95. On page 94, facing it, is an example of how true it is. In a graph printed sidewise up the page, Bolton lists the words that, in his social circle as of 1979, described different levels of emotionality: "satisfied--happy--jubilant" and so on. He asserts that, for people he knew, "angry" was more intense than "mad."

I find this assertion startling, perhaps because, etymologically, "angry" means "showing any degree of anger" while "mad" means "rabid, violently insane, out of one's mind with rage."

Does this mean that Bolton was wrong about the way the people he knew used "mad" and "angry"? No; it means that it's important to pay attention to the way the people we know use words. One can always ask.

So far as I know every English-speaking member of my generation has read People Skills. (How well we use the information this book contains is another question.) Those of us who write, speak, teach, or make business presentations have read other books on the art of communication too, and may feel that those books go beyond People Skills...but, on consideration, most of them do seem to presuppose that everybody had read People Skills first.

So, who needs to buy the copy I have for sale? Younger people who've not read it yet, of course. People Skills is not written in the helpful "First Book of" or "Idiot's Guide to" format, but it really is a first book about communication.