Customer Reviews

How to Talk to Anybody About Anything: Breaking the Ice With Everyone from Accountants to Zen Buddhists

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I thought I was buying a book about, literally "how to talk to anybody about anything." What I got was an encyclopedia of about 200 professions, with questions to ask them about their professions.

The title should be "Questions To Ask People About Their Profession, Covering 200 Different Professions."

I want my money back! This type of deceptive marketing is infuriating

This is only a good book if you want to start a conversation with stranger! It is a good follow up to Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" where the point is "To be interested in other people so that others will be interested in you". However it doesn't outline what you should talk about from front to back. It only gives sample questions about what you should talk about with a list of a few hundred professions. So buy the book if your point is to "Start a conversation", but don't expect the book to carry you through the whole nine yards. So think of it as a reference guide, not a book about "conversation" per se.

Lured to the book by its promising title, I read several pages. I was disappointed. The book is organized by occupation, and a page of suggested conversation follows each listing in interview format. Not only are many of the topics outdated or uninformed, many are negative, cliched, or stilted. Please trust me when I say "If you haven't looked through this book, don't buy it."

This book is completely useless. You can spend hours memorizing the sample questions on how to talk to an accountant, a bodybuilder, or whatever, but all you'll be doing is conducting an interview and pretending like your informed when really your not. I don't call that communication. Save your money.

I was expecting a book that teaches you how to talk to anyone and create a great conversation. Instead, this book lists occupations and gives you topics to discuss with people if they have a certain job on that list. In other words, one needs to memorize what questions go with which job, then, if you happen to meet a doctor, for example, you can talk about the move to HMOs and the changes in healthcare business. I didn't find it very helpfull

When I had read How to Make Anyone Fall in Love With You, I had thought Lowndes was a wonderful author. I ordered How to Talk to Anybody About Anything, and was dissappointed. I expected her to explain how to make good conversation, but she failed to do so. All she did was tell you questions to ask specific people. If you dont know what they do how do you know what to ask? What are those questions to ease into the conversation before you find out what they do? Are you supposed to remember every question for every instance, or must you tell the person to hold on a second while you pull out the book to look up questions? This book will serve a person who is invited to their mate's buisness dinner and wants to know how to speak to a person of that profession, but still, the 5-8 questions she tells you to ask is not enough to carry on a long conversation, and you would be better off buying a book on that occupation alone. I was very dissappointed in this book, and would not reccommend that many people buy this.

I was under the impression that I was purchasing a book that would give some helpful insight as to how to carry a conversation. I was disappointed that there isn't much beyond questions to ask people when you meet them.

However, I plan to hang on to this as a reference book. It is a good starting point to developing a conversation with a person you are meeting for the first time. Rather than standing there talking about the weather, or saying, "so what do you do?" You can actually be prepared with a few questions to get the conversation flowing.

Sometimes it is just nice to know what to say when you meet a priest, wine connoisseur, cowboy or ship captain...for the first time. Afterall, this book is about, "breaking the ice" in conversations.

The title is a misnomer. There is no generalized guidance about how to talk to anybody about anything. Each short chapter gives you topics and buzzwords to use with specific professional groups or hobbyists.

This book should be used as a companion to her other book, "How to Talk to Anyone: 92 Little Tricks for Big Success in Relationships." It seems that all the people who are giving this book bad reviews are actually looking for the material in this other book. Once you have read the other book, you will understand how this book is useful, and you will be very glad she wrote it because you will have a need for it. This book is almost more like an exercise that expands upon some of the points covered in this other book (which, by the way, is excellent).

If you are looking to network with groups of people unfamiliar to you, then this is the book for you! This will give you ways to start a conversation with all types of folks, and fit in. If you are looking for entire conversations spelled out for you, this is NOT the book for you. However, if you need ways to begin conversations (perhaps you have read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People) and to get folks to open up to you, then this book with provide ice breakers into their world.