Book Review: Yes or No

Title: Yes or No



Author: Spencer Johnson

Date: 1992

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-016857-9

Length: 103 pages

Quote: “When I pursue only the real need, I am more decisive and I make better decisions sooner.”

This short book is a long teaching story about a fictional young man who learns all about making decisions from his fellow tourists on a group tour where they climb a mountain. Well, the author was in Hawaii at the time.

Here’s what you’ll like, if you do: The young man gets a  simple guide to decision making that fits onto a card, which is attached to a page at the back of the book.

Here’s what you may not like so much: Not all of us suffer from the deficiency of conscience that causes some people (read: extroverts) to need to be prodded to think about how a given decision will make them feel about themselves. For us, Ben Carson’s Take the Risk, which presupposes a healthy conscience, is a simpler and more efficient explanation of how to make decisions.

I don’t think the “story” motif does a lot for the book, either. Johnson’s story is not in the same class with, e.g., Susan Trott’s Holy Man.

And I’m turned off by the title, which I hear as a nag intended to push someone into a hasty, bad decision. Feeling indecisive is often mistaken for a sign of weakness when it is, in fact, a sign that we may be missing a key piece of information we need to make a good decision. If someone is up in your face, staring at you and pestering, “Yes or no? What’s it going to be? Yes or no?”, that key piece of information is likely to have something to do with why this pushy pest is trying to manipulate you into choosing between unsatisfactory options, and why the right answer is likely to be “neither yes nor no, but set up a different question.”

“Are you going to help me get rich quick in a sleazy ‘business’ venture? Yes or no?” The correct question is probably: “Am I going to ignore your illegal and/or immoral ‘business’ venture, or report it?”

“Do you want to sleep with me? Yes or no? Now or never?” Even if you might previously have thought you did want to sleep with this guy, eventually, the correct question is “Is it enough just never to see or speak to you again, or do I need to report your harassment to the police?”

“Do you want to take advantage of this red-hot bargain price? Yes or no?” The correct question is likely to be “If the product is something I’d be willing to test if the company paid me, why is the company paying this pest to do this hard sell routine? No company would want to be associated with a pushy sales pest, let alone pay one, if they weren’t afraid of losing money...might this red-hot deal on Product X be an indication that the company or its competitor is about to launch a much better Product Y as soon as they can push all the Product X off the store shelves?”

After being in a few “yes or no?” conversations we learn that the correct reply to “Yes or no?” usually begins with “No,” and if we’re still interested in the subject of the conversation, we’re interested in pursuing it with someone other than the person who nags “Yes or no?”  This does not set us up for any positive appreciation of a book with Yes or No as its title.

But somebody out there will enjoy the story and need to be reminded to stimulate any possible growth in their  conscience through “feelings about myself,” so Yes or No is for that person.

To buy it here, send the usual $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. At least eight books of this size will fit into a package; feel free to mix in books of different sizes, and books by different authors.