Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
Lynne Truss
Readers coming to this book from Truss's previous bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves will be at once delighted with and, perhaps, slightly disappointed in this follow-up. Truss brings her trademark uncompromising crankiness to problems with rudeness and public interactions in modern society, with mixed results. Truss is occasionally at her hilarious, cynical best in this book, but there is an overwhelming feeling of desperation throughout the book, as if she is trying so hard to be crotchety that she forgets what she is saying and relies instead on the crankiest possible wording and reaction, to the point where she repeatedly undermines her own arguments. One moment she is celebrating an action and the next deriding it; should we be mindful of people's privacy or indignant that they don't want to interact with us? Truss doesn't come down on one side or the other, and in such an opinionated work as this the waffling quickly becomes annoying. This, coupled with the over-the-top tone and prose, often means the book feels like a gimmick, which is unfortunate because Truss is occasionally very funny. Her continuously offended tone works with the subject matter, but is stretched to the point of breaking the flow and effectiveness of what she is saying; the book becomes at some point a caricature of itself. Talk to the Hand is an occasionally witty look at some societal patterns of rudeness in the modern age, but ultimately the book is too self-conscious to be much more pleasant than grating.
Grade: C
Lynne Truss
Readers coming to this book from Truss's previous bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves will be at once delighted with and, perhaps, slightly disappointed in this follow-up. Truss brings her trademark uncompromising crankiness to problems with rudeness and public interactions in modern society, with mixed results. Truss is occasionally at her hilarious, cynical best in this book, but there is an overwhelming feeling of desperation throughout the book, as if she is trying so hard to be crotchety that she forgets what she is saying and relies instead on the crankiest possible wording and reaction, to the point where she repeatedly undermines her own arguments. One moment she is celebrating an action and the next deriding it; should we be mindful of people's privacy or indignant that they don't want to interact with us? Truss doesn't come down on one side or the other, and in such an opinionated work as this the waffling quickly becomes annoying. This, coupled with the over-the-top tone and prose, often means the book feels like a gimmick, which is unfortunate because Truss is occasionally very funny. Her continuously offended tone works with the subject matter, but is stretched to the point of breaking the flow and effectiveness of what she is saying; the book becomes at some point a caricature of itself. Talk to the Hand is an occasionally witty look at some societal patterns of rudeness in the modern age, but ultimately the book is too self-conscious to be much more pleasant than grating.
Grade: C
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