How to Speak, How to Listen Book

Listen to How I Speak would have been the better title for Adler's didactic abortion How to Speak, How to Listen. A book that styles itself as a how to speak and listen, there is very little content of this kind. Instead, Adler moralizes ad nauseum on a completely different problem: why it is important to speak and listen. This discussion is not out of place, but Adler gives it so much focus, and conveyed in a patronizing tone, that the question of why composes nearly the entire book--far out of proportion with what was due.

To compound the annoyance, Adler embarks upon a twice bold, half intelligent, completely unilluminating systemization of types of talk: persuasive, informative, social, et cetera. This might have been suited as a preliminary for the sole purpose of outlining the book's course. But Adler returns obsessively to his system, as if he were immersed in a pathbreaking program to remake the intellectual landscape of discourse--defining and categorizing like a latter-day Aristotle. This was a bizarre excursus that should not have even been started, but once begun was too feeble and misshapen to make any distance or do any work, and had to be nursed for the entire journey.

When finally one passes beyond the nerve grating, eminently forgettable ramblings on significance and arrives at the promised material--how to speak and listen--all there is, is a sorry assortment of recommendations, either patently obvious or uselessly abstract. This was anticlimatic in the extreme. By this point the reader is too tired, enervated, and irritated to bear any more disappointments. If Adler, perhaps, hadn't taken the long meandering course the let down wouldn't be so large. But like a long treasure hunt that returns no treasure, the reader feels ready to mutiny.

If this entry sounds shrill or callous that was not my intent--it's been several days since I finished the book and any courtesies that are owed have since faded from memory. I can applaud Adler for his ability to reduce the discussion to simple terms, so that his lessons are easily received. But this does not exonerate him from the fundamental error of offering on substance for all of his sound, or the irritating digressions and circumlocutions that lead to no where.