AARP
From the AARP book review:
Daniel Menaker began to fear for the future of conversation at his own dinner table: “Some friends were over and our talk was peppered with ’24/7,’ ‘pushing the envelope,’ and ‘at the end of the day,’ ” the 68-year-old New York editor recalls. “It made me a little insane to realize that business clichés had invaded my personal relationships.”
It also made him something of a dialogue doctor, intent on assessing the health and well-being of conversation in the land. His diagnosis, laid out in A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, may hearten or deflate you—possibly both—but never again will you think of chat as a trivial affair. “We can enrich our lives by understanding the great rewards of good conversations,” Menaker says. “In finding out who the person we’re talking to is, we find out who we are.”
Intrigued by the book’s utopian premise—that “every time people talk together in a social and mutually gratifying way, the world becomes a better place”—I invited the author of A Good Talk to sit down for, well, a good talk.
Read the interview here.
