Two Book Reviews

I should be finishing The Picture of Dorian Gray that I borrowed from my coworker.  It’s a special annotated, unedited and uncensored version she ordered straight from Britain, and she was very kind in letting me have it these past few weeks.  I already put off reading it so I could finish the other library books that were due before I cracked these pages open.  The annotations are as much fun to read as the novel itself.  But it’s what’s been added that makes this book really interesting.

Or rather I should say what’s been put back in.  Oscar Wilde’s publishers took several looks at his manuscript and said, “Yeah, we’re taking this crap out before we invest our money in this.”  So out went all the material Victorian England would not stand for.  It was still an edgy book.  When I read it in college, I was intrigued at the homoeroticism that was bubbling beneath the surface; it certainly added a level of the danger and deviance of Dorian Gray and how he was ruining the lives of the young men that came within his sphere of influence.  From chapter one of this uncensored version, it’s obvious that homosexuality is the force behind all of Dorian’s motivations and one of the tools Lord Henry will use to deceive and corrupt Dorian.

(I’ll also add that while these additions and annotations make this story more fascinating, I’ve grown to despise Oscar Wilde himself.  Why is it that some of the greatest artists tend to be such despicable human beings?  Wilde turned out to be a terrible husband and quite the philanderer.)

As I said, I should be finishing this book to give it back to my coworker, but I get distracted easy and the other day, it came from browsing in the bargain section where I found a couple of stacks of body language books.

I am fascinated by body language.  I have been fascinated by it since I lived in Dallas.  During my mission, we had a mission president who was in charge of making sure we were taken care of and also to make sure that we weren’t being idiots.  Our mission president’s wife was a great support in that.  While he was teaching us how to be good teachers and dedicated workers, she got down to the nitty-gritty: how to clean our apartments, sew our clothes, and proper table etiquette.  These lessons were intense; I learned I had been buttering bread wrong my entire life (you’re supposed to break off a bite-sized piece, then butter it, then eat it.  Did anybody else know that?  I had no idea.)

But the best training she ever gave was on how to read people.  It was the one time she ever focused on our teaching skills and it wasn’t something we could learn anywhere else.  She was adamant that we know exactly how the people we were teaching felt about us and what we were saying.  While you can’t read a person’s mind by the way they fold their hands, they are speaking with their movements every bit as much as what they’re saying with their mouths; and because our body movements are so often unconscious, you’re less likely to be lied to if you’re reading the body.

This training changed the way I thought and acted more than anything else in those two years I was in Texas.  Something I paid attention to was the “double-cross.”  A “cross” is where somebody folds their arms or crosses their legs.  If it’s just a single cross, it could mean that their closed to what you’re saying or it could just be how they relax.  There’s other visual clues you’ll have to read to determine what it means.  But a “double-cross,” where both legs and arms are folded, or legs are crossed and a hand grabs the ankle, or something of the like, is a clear sign that they are closed off from what you’re saying.  Paying attention to this alone was a huge help in any discussions that I had with the people I met.

As soon as my mission was over, I went looking for books just on this subject.  They’re a lot harder to find than I expected but I’ve come to understand now that this is a fairly new study, starting from the 1960s.  Fifty years is such a short time for scientific research on kinesics, but we have made great strides already, and I have snapped up anything I could on the subject.

What intrigued me was where I found the resources, because studying body language has different focuses and motivations.  Criminologists study body language to spot the liars.  Salesman and other professionals use it to see whether they can seal the deal.  There’s some dating advice to see judge by the body language whether you have a shot or should move onto someone else.

The criminology perspective is a favorite of mine.  There was a lot of focus on the eyes, especially blinking.  People blink if you have something in your eyes, of course, but you can gauge somebody’s attitude by how fast they blink.  A person who is lying tends to blink much faster than he would if he were telling the truth.  Also, somebody looking for a fight will blink more often as well.

All this is leading up to the most impulse purchase I’ve had since Christmas: The Definitive Guide to Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.  Four hundred pages of sheer pleasure and addiction.

What was cool (and not surprising) was in the introductory chapter, where it mentions flat out that women tend to be more naturally inclined to reading body language than men.  Part of it is how their brains are wired and another part of it is related to mothering experience.  After all, for roughly the first five years of raising a child, mothers can’t communicate with words.  They have to judge what their baby wants by its nonverbal communication, whether it’s hungry or upset or tired.  It’s all nonverbal.

This also explains what we call “women’s intuition.”  Even when it’s subconscious, women tend to pay attention to the body language first and what’s spoken second.  If there’s a conflict between the two, the body language is what they will focus in on.  Men, as a rule, don’t.  It’s a big reason why a couple can walk into a room, the woman will read how the people in the room are feeling, who they’re with, if somebody’s getting along, etc., and the guy is wondering where she’s getting all this.

Funny enough, this also why so many fortune tellers tend to be women.  They are very, very good at reading a body, and the crystal ball and Tarot cards tend to be the glitter and glam that adds to their show and distraction from the real talent.

In short, I’m loving this book.  It’s awesome.  I just started, so I’m only at the part where they talk about hands, which is one of the three most expressive features in our body; it says so much about whether we’re open or closed, authoritative or submissive, friendly or aggressive.  But not only do the authors talk about what signals mean, they will go into the history about why we do the things we do (such as handshakes) and even tips of how we can respond with our hands when somebody is trying to dominate you.  Blown away.

(I’m also kind of blown away by how many subjects I was able to put in this post without any unifying theme whatsoever.)