Customer Reviews

The Concise Book of Lying

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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!

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.

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.

Concise Book Of Lying provides a cross-cultural survey of deception and the role which lying has played throughout history, using early stories modern accounts to draw connections between lying trends and why individuals lie. Social and psychological issues are both considered in this survey of lying.

I attempted this book with great expectations but ended wishing for much more. Some parts were interesting, I enjoyed the introduction and the first two chapters, on the bible and [mostly] Greek mythology were very good. The rest of the book had engaging vignettes but overall they were verbose, bland and non-conclusive. The whole book seemed to me a little like navel-gazing or a sketch of an idea, with lots of dangling ideas. For some odd reason the book concludes with "lying" in nature (camouflage, mimicry, misdirection, etc.). For a while it looked like the author was going to say that this is where we first learned to lie, but luckily she does not make that mistake. In the end it was like the rest of the book, a collage of interesting stories that the author noticed.

There was a section on the middle ages, centered around witch-hunting, the ordeal and Malleus Maleficarum that I found very interesting, but in the end it seemed there was no end. It seemed that the author was really enjoying her writing, and one vignette followed another until the end of the chapter where the author tries to wrap up the chapter and then quickly moves on to the next chapter with: "Conclusion? Human beings have devoted inordinate effort to exposing lies and determining the truth. This being the case, we shouldn't be surprised to find that there has been a great deal of effort in the opposite direction as well..." This is an incredibly bland and obvious conclusion for a very interesting chapter. The next chapter is about lying in war where the author makes the amazing statement people (governments) condone and actually do lie and deceive the enemy in war! There is a review of Sun Tzu that has the depth of a puddle. All-in-all, everything in this chapter should be obvious to anyone who is awake.

The chapter on "lie detector" machines was interesting but, again, shallow. Throughout this book there has been an almost complete lack of science, depth, or "rigor". Lately a couple of researchers in San Francisco have come up with some amazing information on facial forms (the meanings of the combinations of all the possible muscle-movements in the face), most of them communicate information and many of them relate to how we perceive trustworthiness, but there is not a mention of this or any other recent science in this book.

It seems to me that a book such as this could take one of two tracks. Either the author could go deep into the modern science and the latest studies with a lot of deep information, or the author could give a lot of history, background and opinion. Mostly, this book does neither. This book leans more to background information, but without depth. The author almost completely avoids giving personal opinion or experience (excluding the introduction) and there are almost no actual conclusions.

I would not be interested in a broad conclusion such as "Lying is good/bad", but there are many opportunities where for a certain action or time, there could be a discussion about whether the objectives were met, what the repercussions were, etc. For some vignettes this happened (operation Mincemeat was pretty good, "lie detectors" had a few ideas wrapped up) but many (uncle Remus, the Indian myths of Krishna, all vignettes of war or state action) were pretty much quickly introduced and then left hanging. At one point (they are in the index) the author mentions Locke and Descartes and discusses their philosophy for most of two pages. To cover these two philosophers in less than two pages is a little too quick for me. There is no context or history. I couldn't follow how their philosophy affected those who followed, but this is partly due to the verbose style of writing in addition to the lack of narrative.

One last problem with this book was that the endnotes were not noted in the text, so I often was looking in the back to see if what I just read had some more information or a source.

This is one of the best books I have ever read.

Ms Sullivan is a superb scholar. I will read

anything written by her skillful hand and

sharp intellect. And that's no lie.

Squiggles

This is an amusing and thoughtful journey through the tangled and ambiguous world of lies
and deception. Sullivan wears her learning lightly. Highly recommended!