The Tao of Conversation

If you want to explore the art of conversation - if you want to learn how to have a *real* conversation, this is the book for you. Most "conversations" are simply just one person engaging in a monologue while the other person waits for their turn to do their monologue. I think much of lonliness and misunderstandings in the world today could be eliminated if people actually practiced what is taught in this little book.

I'm reading this book on my way to a conference, a conference where I will give the keynote address and conduct a panel and a workshop. While a lot of what Michael Kahn says seems like plain common sense, it's the putting it into practice that counts. I'll be trying to do just that.If common sense were always put into practice, we'd call it "common action" instead of common sense. Kahn's examples and propositions are not things to be documented in APA style, but clues to how to act, if you want to have really good, useful conversations that affirm and support you and the person you're talking with. The book is not written for academics, but for people who talk with other people--and would like the results to be more interesting and useful, and less combative.I'd like to note also, that though it was written before e-mail became a dominant mode of communication for many of us, this book's insights will work well in that environment, and especially on e-lists, where the flow of messages is much like a group conversation.We've all had conversations that at least might have proceeded in the helpful, healthy ways Kahn suggests. This book is helping me to sort out why my better conversations were better, and learn to make the better ones happen more often. More than that, in less than 200 pages, who can ask?

I came accross this book by accident. I'm not a scholar on conversation, so this book not only opened up a new idea to me, but has inspired me investigate more about the topic of conversation. I feel that because it opened my eyes to how I converse and has helped me at my business, it deserves four stars.