"Read People Like A Book" Book Review (Includes spoilers and semi-rant)

This review focuses on my thoughts on the manual Read People Like A Book by Patrick King. For a unit at school, I had to learn about technical manuals by reading one in a group and also creating my own personal manual. My group chose how to read people like a book. In this review, I will speak on how I believe this manual did in teaching this skill. Please note that these are my own personal views.

Overall, this book covered many useful aspects and skills including body language, ideologies and motivations behind actions, and personality types. The author, Patrick King, clearly researched his topics well as he cites many people and their thoughts in this book.

However, personally, I believe that I will score this book a 2/5.

There are many reasons that factored into this score and I will list them below.

1) Throughout this book, King consistently states how you can't focus on just one of these skills/aspects and must look at the whole picture when "reading someone like a book." While I believe this is very good advice, it felt like that was all he was saying, and he failed to actively show how you could implement all these skills into an overall conclusion about someone. He just leaves it to you to try and do this; this is made even more difficult as he provides you with too many different meanings and skills to remember and call up at any moment when reading someone.

2) Additionally, I feel like almost every page has a citation or two from someone. While it is undoubtedly important to cite your sources and include them in works, it seemed like that was all there was: just citations of data everywhere. I didn't feel like he really expanded on them with his own ideas as much as he should have and instead would just connect it to another citation. Therefore, the little analysis made me question if he really should be teaching this skill. I mean no offense when I say that, but he does such a broad range of ideas and skills and doesn't really individually touch his own ideas to them. I feel like it would have been better if the book focused on one of these skills and had citations but also more of his own ideas and analysis.

3) Personally, I think that his examples of how to use the skills in real life weren't very helpful. He tends to use extremes as examples, and I, as a teenager, don't really relate to these situations. For example, when talking about lie detecting, King uses sample situations about a spouse lying to you or even an FBI agent questioning someone about finding/discovering a body. Despite it being cool to know about these extreme examples, I don't think one would generally do what happens in the extreme examples in a milder situation. I could be wrong about that, but in my opinion, that's what I believe. Also, I don't think I will encounter discovering a body and get in that situation in my lifetime. While a spouse lying likely is more common, that's a far way off from applying to me so it wasn't helpful to me specifically. It might be to someone older who has a spouse.

4) I wish the author would have included images or diagrams in his book. Everything was sentences and blocky paragraphs with large text. I feel like including diagrams or pictures to show the facial microexpressions or body language or even some representation of his example scenarios would have made for a much more engaging read. While I had a general idea about what he meant, I think actually inputting images would have furthered readers' understanding of what he meant so it was more easily observable in the world.

In conclusion, this book was very interesting to read and learn about, but it wasn't that engaging to me and didn't teach me the skill very well. Thus, I give the book 2/5 stars. I do want to acknowledge though that, as you probably know, I don't usually read technical manuals, so maybe these occurrences are commonplace in that division of books. If they are and you happen to like that, then take this review with a grain of salt.