A review by julis
The Serious Business of Small Talk: Becoming Fluent, Comfortable, and Charming by Carol A. Fleming

3.0

Conflicted feelings here. About 75% of this is a reasonably useful, extremely functional guide to starting social interactions, presented in a plain language way. Some of the tips I’ll absolutely be using.

Buuuuut she doesn’t remotely bother to unpack any assumptions, there’s large chunks that are just quoted from someone else’s work without much (or any) critical analysis, and then there’s this:

So I took it upon myself to interview thirty-five C-level executives in San Francisco (thirty men and five women), asking them the following question: “Women’s speaking style is frequently cited as a reason they are not elevated to upper levels of leadership in corporations. I am designing a course on Executive Level Communication Skills for Women. Based on your own observation, what would you want me to be sure to include in such a training?”
Long story short, and amid a wide variety of answers (it was an open-ended question!), I made the following observations:
• Men cited the features of women’s voices and speech patterns that typically differed from men as “the problem.”
• They don’t like it when women try to act like men.

In other words: Men found that women were “the problem” when they acted like women, and also when they acted like men. Perhaps the problem here is the sexism?

But no. There is literally no discussion of this second finding. Just several more pages on how women can be less offensive to men’s delicate feelings :(