An indispensable manual on all aspects of public speaking and a boon to those who may be anxious about it.
A new installment in the Non-Obvious Guide series provides a comprehensive plan for improving one’s performance in all kinds of presentations.
People may think of presentations as being confined to the world of businesses and PowerPoint, but their essence—delivering a message and some version of oneself to other people, including strangers—is something all of us do almost every day, and this has only become truer since the initial outbreak of Covid-19, when many people effectively became onscreen performers overnight. Professional coach Farrington draws on both her past as an actor and her long experience of helping clients with public speaking in order to make and reinforce her central point: that making any kind of presentation is giving a performance. It requires research, rehearsal, and backup plans in case of disaster. She organizes much of her advice around what she terms the “Three C’s” of a good presentation: confidence, conviction, and connection. Each chapter is designed for maximum utility, featuring chapter summaries, visuals, bulleted points, key takeaways, and links to further online resources. Many illustrations and charts accompany Farrington’s discussions of every aspect of giving a presentation, from nonverbal communication to aspects of one’s voice, including resonance, pitch, projection, and hellers—Farrington’s term for filler words and sounds, such as um, like, and y’know, which many people use during gaps in their speech.
Readers will likely be hard-pressed to decide which aspect of Farrington’s authority is more useful to them as they read: her background in public-speaking coaching or her background in acting. Fortunately, they don’t need to choose, as both are wonderfully represented throughout this book. Intriguingly, she tells tales of anonymized clients whose intelligence and authenticity seemed to vanish the moment they got in front of an audience, at which point they went mute or droned on like robots. She’s coached many such people to better results, but her theatrical background is equally vital to the advice she gives here—particularly when it comes to rehearsal, a key element that she warns is often neglected in an age of seemingly casual Zoom meetings. For instance, she mentions how actors divide their scripts into “beats” (“any time you have a change in emotion, a new thought, a new tactic, or a new engagement tool”) to help them to master the whole. Likewise, she provides readers with extensive tips on vocals, observing that “it’s a cruel betrayal when a highly intelligent person is sabotaged by the sound of their own voice.” She’s insightful and empathetic on a range of other topics, from audience engagement to the “ick factor” of using green screens during at-home video presentations. She always seems to be operating from the assumption that her readers are smart and capable of any improvement they want to make. In the undeniably vast crowd of books about public speaking, this one stands out for its intelligent, direct approach.
An indispensable manual on all aspects of public speaking and a boon to those who may be anxious about it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-64687-046-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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