10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Paths Away from Truthfulness . . . and Their Implications, August 6, 2001
The last book I read about lying was Professor Sissela Bok's serious examination of the subject. That book took a very high moral ground, and showed the obvious benefits of more truthfulness than most people practice. Having not read much on the subject since then, I was curious about what a new look at the subject would show.
I found The Concise Book of Lying to be more entertaining and encompassing than Professor Bok's book, Lying. On the other hand, it also seemed to lack a rigor that left me not actually learning very much.
Any book about lying is going to be somewhat awkward. We don't often write about moral subjects, so our models are sermons rather than more normal writing. The author can hardly come down in favor of lying generally, so this makes the author seem distant and superior in some unavoidable ways simply by selecting the subject.
Almost all of the material here was familiar to me before I read the book. So getting a concise version of it was like reading a summary of what I knew already.
The book begins with examples of lying in the Bible, and tricksters in various mythologies (usually those who bring fire). The book goes on to look at the psychology of why people lie, and where lying can be costly. The lesson is that one should be cautious about avoiding the short-term pain by lying in order to get a larger, long-term one like loss of credibility. From there, Professor Sullivan explore the ways people can indulge in self-deception (a very dangerous form of lying). She also looks at modern and medieval methods of trying to ferret out lying (oaths, burning, trials, dunking, lie detector machines, and sodium pentathol).
The most interesting section to me was the last one on "Lying to the Enemy" which looked at cases where lying has been justified. There is an interesting example of disinformation during World War II involving a dead "soldier" and references to Brer Rabbit's lying about the briar patch and the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. For those who are not familiar with Indian thinking, you also get Krishna's philosophy, "By telling a lie to save a life, one is not touched by sin."
Professor Sullivan ends the book with her thoughts about whether what she captured in the book was truthful or not. I appreciated her candor.
If you would like to understand more about the way lying works and has worked, you will probably get some benefit from this book. If you want a lot of rigor, you should probably prefer the earlier book by Professor Bok.
In either case, I agree with Professor Sullivan that "deception is here to stay." It would have made for interesting reading to consider how the Internet will abet deception in all of its worst forms. We've all seen examples of this.
After you finish thinking about this book, consider where you can be more honest and enjoy better results. In my case, owning up to being the cause of mistakes always pays off well. I seek out opportunities to take the deserved blame.
Shine the brightest light of inquiry when looking for the most important truths!
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Misleading title but thought provoking., April 26, 2002
In this work, Ms. Sullivan provides descriptions of a wide range of lying, lies, and deceptions for our consideration and then selects many of these for additional analysis. The author's examples illustrate the complexities associated with truths and untruths and suggest new ways for the reader to consider and reconsider past behaviors. She examines some accepted societal conventions in a more rigorous light, which should be enjoyable to skeptics. She also reviews a range of technologies and practices which have been used to distinguish between truth and falsehood (and between guilt and innocence) over the years and dismisses them as ineffective. Comparisons of the effectiveness of lie detectors and ordeals as applied during the middle ages (i.e. trial by fire, etc.) were written in a lighter and less philosophical style that provided a break from the more academic style that pervades this book.
The author does not write from a moral point of view that is apparent and she allows the reader to draw his or her own conculsions. Some portions of the book are slow going and anything but concise (but the deception is acceptable since the very title and subject matter should provide the reader with ample warning) but on balance it is engaging and worthwhile.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Couldn't bring myself to finish this book, October 26, 2009
This review is from: The Concise Book of Lying (Paperback)
I could not bring myself to finish this book. The author wants to relate why people lie by citing fictional characters in books and shows such as Othello, Bart Simpson, Seinfeld, etc . This just doesn't do it for me. I felt like I was reading a college students term paper. I wanted to like this book and dragged it out to about page 100 but it just didn't captivate or interest me by that point. Its really just a book of someone's ramblings and attempts to tie things, topics, books, ideas, etc to lying. I feel like I could have wrote this book in college for an English class. A lot of it is common sense, like people don't like it when they are lied to.
The book started out as tough reading, tough as in not interesting. Going through examples in the bible of lies and then to Greek Mythology. I like to read books where I feel I am learning something and this book made me feel like I was just wasting my time. This book is about 200 pages too long. I couldn't waste any more time reading this book while I have so many others I want to read.
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