Law of War Workshop Deskbook Book

This was a book that, for a fleeting moment, I was going to give five stars, and then, for a while, four stars, until finally it managed to drag me down to regretfully awarding it barely three. Purely speculatively, it feels as though the whole book springs from the excitement and interest of the first chapter, which starts with outlining Colonel Mann's Town Topics and the remarkable blackmail and extortion racket that it fronted. This affords a fascinating double-edged example of using the most scurrilous and immoral methods to enforce rectitude and morality amongst the supposedly superior classes, and I half wonder if this intriguing little history inspired the idea of writing more on the subject, but once this ace is played - and it is played almost at the very start - the rest of the hand is rather less winning.

An issue that becomes more apparent with each passing page is that the title is plainly wrong. I can't tell if it's a misleading relic of earlier drafts or a deliberately misrepresentative ploy purely for the sales. Whatever the case, the supposed prominence of rudeness is disappointingly absent. Instead the focus in on the complex interplay of morals, manners, class, and, to a lesser extent, gender and race, in a range of different social spheres, at different times, and in different geographical locations.

The structure is sensible. It splits into two parts. The first half treats public life, the second half private, and the domains it covers are wide-ranging and interesting, comprehending everything from marriage, sex, and child rearing to corporations, cars, and computers. However, whilst the narrative in the beginning bears some clear resemblance to parts of the title, as the chapters go on, the overall purpose seems to be increasingly bogged down and lost in a forest of competing ideas, references, allusions, surmises, examples, and anecdotes. Added to this, whilst it describes itself as a short history, and does indeed look back to the 1900s, 1920s, 1940s, and so on quite frequently, it jumps around in the timelines even within subject chapters, making it difficult to follow a pattern of progress. Overall, if the goal were to weave multiple intricate threads into a single, smooth, coherent braid of reasoning, instead we end up with more of a prickly, circular bird's nest.

Another curiosity of the book is that it doesn't really seem sure about its audience. There are hints that it's meant for scholars - references to academics and research, use of some very low frequency lexis, a general air of highbrow erudition - and then it is strangely contrasted with a heavy reliance on examples drawn from the media, an elementary approach to the subject overall, and some surprising gaps in the literature. For instance, there is no mention of the field of politeness research which, even by this book's publication date in 1999, included several pretty seminal pieces that were a decade or more old, by researchers such as Robin Lakoff (1989), Geoffrey Leech (1983), and Penelope Brown & Stephen Levinson (1978/1987). Even the first work into impoliteness was materialising, such as that by Jonathan Culpeper (1996), though admittedly this was very new. It seems to dither awkwardly somewhere between would-be thesis and extended newspaper column, sometimes favouring one or the other before abruptly lurching back the other way.

In a similar vein, at times there seems to be more attention to style than substance, and the extensive vocabulary that Caldwell deploys, whilst it often fits, sometimes feels more forced, especially when there are plenty of perfectly suitable, better-known alternatives available. Finally, the whole thing also seems a lengthy exploration of a fairly simple point, which could boiled right down to "manners are a complicated, completely subjective social construct mired in morals and class, that differ widely across space and time."

In short, after chapter one grabbed me, the rest seemed to be at pains to gradually pry each one of my fingers back off the book and get me to return it to the shelf.