Customer Reviews

Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt The Door

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(49)

 

 

Lynn Truss has written another witty book that will stick well beyond the initial read. "Talk to the Hand" is a good whack to the head. In "Talk," Truss defines and analyzes six areas in which our dealings with strangers seem to be getting more unpleasant and inhuman.

Truss highlights the loss of punctuation signaling the vast and under-acknowledged problem of illiteracy in "Eats, Shoots, & Leaves." In "Talk," she addresses the collapse of manners and the vast and under-acknowledged problem of social immorality.

In Chapter 3, "My bubble, my rules," Truss goes after the issue of personal space and a person's right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed, that is until the arrival of the cell phone! Now, we are forced to listen to another's intimate conversation in restaurants, grocery stores, and even in the john...The tension between public and private space is a growing flashpoint.

Have you ever asked someone to move outside with their cell phone? If not, proceed immediately to Chapter 4, "The Universal Eff-off Reflex," and learn about the lash-back reflex of shocking proportions which your are about to receive for pointing out bad manners.

According to Truss, you can equate good manners not only with virtue in today's environment but also with positive heroism. "Talk" is a good mirror for all of us to look into.

Familiar with the author's 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', I saw this small book in our library's new release section. While there are a few thoughtful passages, the book mainly contains inconsistent rants about the decline of polite society. These include a puzzling, embarassing attack on the gluten and lactose intolerant and a passage comparing online banking to 'doing you own dental work' (sic) and 'DIY funerals: the modern way'. Truss laments our lack of 'please' and 'thank you' but then disavows 'the enforced perkiness of American service workers'. She acknowledges the empowering effect of the availability of choices to modern women, then complains that too many choices exist in today's society. My outrage at the $20.00 hardcover list price for 200 pages further contributed to the low rating, especially considering each page barely contains a half-dozen sentences.

Congratulations Ms. Truss on managing to offend 1-3% of the population in only the first five pages of a book condemning bad manners! For SHAME!

Are you offended that airlines and schools no longer serve peanuts due to the prevalence of peanut allergies? Or that diabetics sometimes must eat in meetings? Or that handicap spaces often take up prime positions in parking lots? Why is it acceptable to poke fun and cry offense from someone else's medical disability?

A gluten-free diet due to gluten intolerance is NOT an option. It is a medical prescription that is mandatory FOR LIFE. It is necessary for survival, even if it means playing 20 questions at the periodic unavoidable restaurant dinner, standing for HOURS in a grocery store reading product labels, insisting on accurate ingredient information from food, drug, and cosmetic manufacturers, preparing almost every meal you eat yourself, and in short ensuring your survival in a toxic (and often harshly unforgiving) world. I'd like to see you try this without ever offending anyone!

Usually we suffer in silence. The price of not successfully maintaining our gluten-free diet is health issues building gradually from digestive problems to various incurable conditions (such as cancer, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, and overall systemic failure). Perhaps you would feel less "inconvenienced" if we immediately dropped dead from exposure like those with peanut allergies sometimes do. Maybe then you and others like you would recognize the severity of our condition.

We "inconvenience" others as little as possible, and then only when necessary. The only other alternative for the millions of us afflicted with this disorder is to lock ourselves into our homes...to die.

I was horrified to learn that on page 5 of "Talk to the Hand," Lynne Truss writes:

" I now can't abide many, many things, and am actually always on the lookout

for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I hear of someone

being 'gluten intolerant' or 'lactose intolerant', for example, I feel I've

been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant too. I mean, how much longer

do we have to put up with that gluten crap?"

This isn't funny to folks with celiac disease, who are both lactose and gluten intolerant. These are painful and sometimes life-threatening conditions which, at best, make it difficult to safely eat anything you don't cook yourself. Eating a few parts per million of gluten results in severe illness and pain. With celiac disease, you live an isolated life without eating out, eating at parties, traveling, etc.

Lynne obviously has no idea about what it is like to live with celiac disease. If you think that the celiac community has no sense of humor, rewrite the paragraph so it says:

"Whenever I hear of someone having 'diabetes' or 'anaphylactic shock from peanuts', for example, I feel I've been missing out. I want to be diabetic too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that insulin crap?"

Is that funny?

How ironic that a book about rudeness is so very offensive.

The Utter Bloody Rudest thing of all in this book is Ms. Truss and her ignorant bigotry on gluten intolerance, i.e. celiac disease. Guess what, Ms. Truss? 3 million Americans, and a little over 1% of Britons are genetically gluten-intolerant (and probably similar percentages for the rest of the world), and this life-damaging disease KILLS an unknown number of people each year. So you don't like dealing with gluten intolerance? We don't either, but we don't have a choice. Get over yourself, and quit slinging gratuitous insults at people dealing with serious medical issues.

Upon reading this book I can only conclude that the publishers persuaded (forced)Truss to write another book as any rubbish she churned out would ride sweetly on the back of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The very concept of the book has literally been done to death and it has definitely been done a great deal more entertainingly.

Her choice of topics used for examples frankly beggars belief. Mobile phones on trains, call centre automated answering systems, discourteous drivers and so on, oh hillarious, I never thought of those!!! - not only does she use these mind numbingly dull themes, totally void of any originality, but she uses them over and over and over again.

She has also invested an inordinate amount of text space promoting her previous success, there is barely a paragraph that doesn't remind you how jolly clever she was writing her best seller.

The most irritating thing about this book is that most of the "rude" things she describes are not even vaguely rude; instead they are just annoying.... Actually one thing is more irritating and that is the fact that she will no doubt make a huge wad of cash from this crap. Basically the book is really, really weak. She is incredibly fortunate to have some influential chums who wanted this book to succeed.

If a stand up comic came up with even a snippet of this they would be immediately booed off stage.

Not funny, not clever.

I apologize for existing in Ms. Truss' perfect world. Many of us are "imperfect" enough to have food intolerance and allergies. How silly of us to unite and demand options at restaurants and grocery stores. We should have tucked our proverbial tails between our legs, accepted the "poisons" that malevolently affect our lives. That way, Ms. Truss would not need to live in this new-age culture that fosters honest disclosures regarding food ingredients.

Perhaps if all of us "annoying-allergy-fostering-heathens" apologize to Ms. Truss for asking for simple meal choices and a healthy environment to flourish (as she obviously is), then maybe society can step forward. I never thought someone would label my medical condition as a "nuisance" in their life. Is she really mad that restaurants and grocery stores offer gluten free selections? Is she mad that food manufacturers are required to disclose what is in their products? I wish my life encountered as few obstacles as Ms. Truss's -- Imagine, a life so trivial and void of obstacles that one actually has to belittle a portion of the population due to being diagnosed with a genetic disease. Perhaps it would do Ms. Truss some good to research Celiac Disease before she comments on the subject.

While she's at it, why doesn't she criticize deaf people for not being able to hear and handicapped people for being so slow?

Madam, congratulations on offending several million people.

This is Truss' followup to her immensely successful "Eats, Shoots and Leaves. According to the cover it's also a New York Times best seller, but I'm sure I hasn't done as well as her first book. She was ranting about poor punctuation in her earlier book; in this she's ranting about poor manners. And I will agree with much of what she says. The book is a delight to read and she still has a lot of humor in it, but it doesn't measure up to her earlier book. Her writng style is quite similar and she is still fun to read, but perhaps she's a little more angry in this book and that takes the edge off it. Nevertheless the book is worth buying.

Lynn has made a statement in her book that redefines rude, NO. It was more abhorrent than anything described in her book. It was about a disease called celiac disease.

" I now can't abide many, many things, and am actually always on the lookout for more things to find completely unacceptable. Whenever I hear of someone being 'gluten intolerant' or 'lactose intolerant', for example, I feel I've been missing out. I want to be gluten intolerant too. I mean, how much longer do we have to put up with that gluten crap?"

Gluten Intolerance is not an inconvenience. It is classified as a Major Auto Immune disorder. People who are unfortunate enough to suffer from this disease can become extremely ill from the slightest amount of wheat,barley, rye or oats. They can become ill from additives that contain any of those ingredients. Feeling Ill unfortunately is the least of their worries if they are contaminated with Gluten. If they continue to consume it, their digestive system is damaged to the point of no longer absorbing food. When that starts to occur they no longer obtain nutrition from food and are not only feeling ill but are risking any one of many auto immune disorders including lupus, MS, or even cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis. That is only naming a few of the horrible consequences of this disease. It is and can be a life threatening disease. THE ONLY KNOWN MEDICAL TREATMENT IS A LIFE LONG ADHERENCE TO A GLUTEN FREE DIET. This is not a choice.

I watched my beautiful vibrant mother become housebound with degenerative arthritis of the spine. scoliosis, and osteoporosis. 2 of the 3 were directly related to celiac disease and the complete ignorance of the doctors who treated her and did not educate her on the importance of maintaining a gluten free diet. Watching her struggle with her increasing illness, her paralysis in her so called golden years was devastating to both of us. She became a completely different person.

Having an well known author use cheap shots as little more than an attention getting marketing tool on a serious auto immune disorder of this magnitude is absolutely despicable.

please do not purchase this book. Thank you

I think people in England must be much ruder than they are over here, because, although I recognized some of the behaviours she describes, much of it was not familiar to me. The book is an extended rant which just dragged on after a while. It was not as much fun as Eats Shoots and Leaves, mostly because she is just angry, without as much humor as the punctuation book. If you like reading angry rants, get it -- otherwise I'd ignore this particular book.