|
Just when I was beginning to think that being nice was a shameful weakness, Lynne Truss gives us TALK TO THE HAND, a gritty rant appropriately subtitled "The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today." Not only is it timely and true, it's a hoot to read!
You just have to love the whole saying, "Talk to the hand 'cause the face ain't listening." How many times has that happened to you? I have actually faded off with, "Well, it doesn't really matter what I'm saying," when I've embarked on a short (and, I'm positive, quite hilarious) anecdote and my audience (of one) starts grinning at something over my shoulder --- or, worse yet, tosses out a cogent comment to a neighboring group. I figure I can blurt out whatever is on my mind "'cause the face ain't listening," obviously.
The rest of the subtitle is "or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door" and provides half a dozen pet peeves for Ms. Truss to gleefully expound upon. But TALK TO THE HAND is not merely a forum for a thoughtful author to give vent to her personal irks, although she does write "…I now can't abide many, many things, and am actually always on the look-out for more things to find completely unacceptable," which sounds like quite a lot of fun to me.
She explores reasons we might have come to this unhappy state; for instance, TV, one of my favorite disappointments. "One hesitates to blame television for all this because that's such an obvious thing to do. But, come on. Just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not true. People being vulgar and rude to each other...is TV's bread and butter." Or a close contender for top billing: parents with ill-behaved children --- or is it children with incompetent parents? Whichever, the moms and dads have "let their kids manipulate, insult and bully them…taught them to demand respect, but not to show it. Who cares if the result is a generation of unhappy sociopaths? Just so long as the unhappy sociopaths regard their parents as their pals." (I have an example of one of these horrible parent cum buddy types in my very own family and it drives me batty.) As Ms. Truss so sanely points out, this attitude does a disservice to the child as well as to the rest of us.
And then there is the currently popular outlook that no one is responsible for his/her actions. So who is? The scary part is that a significant number of people truly believe that they are a victim of circumstances rather than their own actions, and woe to the person who suggests the opposite. "If you point out to someone that he is in the wrong, you must be prepared for the consequences, which may include violence, but will automatically include Eff Off." To me, the Eff Off reaction, beyond being downright offensive, seems to signal (often physically as well as verbally) an aggressive disassociation with personal culpability.
I could go on and on, because TALK TO THE HAND sparked a righteous outrage that grew inside me as I furiously turned the pages, nodding and chuckling. I can guarantee that you will find yourself recalling experiences of your own that take you to the boiling point just thinking about them. You might even be tempted to write Ms. Truss with shocking examples of the utter bloody rudeness you've run into but heretofore believed you had no one who shared your indignation. Now you have. Revel in it. With enough of us, we can stamp out this insidious rudeness epidemic. Read this book, and be nice!
--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
