Book Notices | How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Amazon   Dale Carnegie's book is the sort of thing you hear about all your life but never bother to pick up, because, I don't know, because it's just there. But I ran across it while hanging around Amazon the other day. It's got an enormous number of reviews (favorable reviews), so somebody's reading it, and looking at some of them my curiosity got the better of me. So what's the book like? Basically, Carnegie offers a lot of very good, common-sense advice, practices which, if followed, probably would do a lot to help you win friends and influence people. His advice could be summarized in a page or two, but not so as to make it stick. What he does is devote one short chapter to each of his tenets--things like, encourage other people to talk about themselves. And then he discusses this practice at length by giving a bunch of real-life examples in which following that advice helped someone out--these are people who took his classes or whose autobiogaphies he's read, for example. All of this is in very straightforward, down-to-earth prose, so it's very readable. The book is also interesting, unintentionally so, because it is to an extent dated. The advice is not dated, but the stories he tells of people who benefitted from it are from a different era, where men with hats were employed by typewriter companies and sent letters via the post to their business contacts. It's kind of charming.