Review: Without Saying a Word

Without Saying a Word is a book about body language. I don't remember why I bought it as an audible book ,since it's kinda hard to just listen to a book about body language without being able to visualize the expressions and body positions discussed. Fortunately, the audible edition of the book comes with a PDF that effectively includes the entire text and diagrams from the book, so I can review it after having listened to the text.

OK, is the book effective? Well, it gives you a lot of ways to detect what someone's position is. The problem is that I think the book has a severe western/American cultural bias, as I'm not sure I've observed many of the body language positions among Asians. They also make a big deal out of micro-expressions, and having read How Emotions are Made, I'm no longer certain that micro-expressions can actually be accurately read or understood.

Nevertheless, however, I do live and operate in a western/American culture, and this book would be a great guidebook when I first moved into this country as to how to interpret inter-personal gestures, and probably worth reviewing if say, I was a sales person. I'm not sure how useful it is though in other settings, and again, I'm not sure how much of what's portrayed here is actually accurate. But you don't have to be 100% accurate if you're a sales person, maybe just reading the material would give you more confidence and that might be worth something all by itself.