The modern Machiavelli Book

You have to think of this book as more of a "proto-persuasion" manual, half-based on New Though positive thinking ideas, half-based in 1970-ies outdated psychology of communication. (not even "negotiation" - really just psychology of communication. In my case (I was expected to do public speaking) it came off as a sort of a disjointed biography with anecdotal evidence of things the author had done in verbal communication (nothing about written communication), with some persuasion techniques not really based on sound modern psychology, but mostly on the first hand experience of the author. It pays to remember this first-hand experience comes from the past, as well as that the culture the author lived in is probably not identical, or even close, to your own. I was given this book by my grandmother, with the idea being that it would somehow make be a better public speaker; it doesn't work for that purpose, of course, and it's unfair to expect it to, because it doesn't teach you to argue, but since there were very few books on the Bulgarian market at the time dealing with verbal communication, it was probably, at the time, not a suboptimal choice. (any solution is better than no solution, especially considering the fact that my problem was being shy, and reading the book made me feel less vulnerable when talking in public)