This is a review of the book Why Men Don't Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes. This book is written by Allan Pease according to the inside first page information although the cover claims it was written by him and his wife. Strangely, it doesn't read like it was written by a man. Another odd thing is that this is exactly the same book as "Why Men Lie and Women Cry", I don't know why. This is particularly annoying because it mentions the other book title many times when it is meant to be referring to itself. You start to think the other book must be full of valuable information not included in this book. Allan, go to the Edit menu and use "Search and Replace", OK ?
Anyone who knows me knows I don't normally read this kind of how-to-tie-your-shoelaces type of book, however, the selection of English language books at my local bookstore was rather limited and I had read the authors (sic) previous book on body language and found it reasonably informative and entertaining. What a mistake! This book claims to be backed by scientific research (page 7) but in actual fact it is full of anecdotal statistics and trivia rather than a well defined argument with several references to back up the argument. For example, `if you search for the keywords "relationship" and "sex" on the web you get 36714 references' (page 6). I don't believe Allan Pease went through every link and verified it was accurate and if he had, by the time he had finished the number would have changed.
Reading this book taught me a new word: misandry. It's the counterpart word to misogyny. And this book is full of it. If you are a female reader you will get plenty of "all men are bastards and at fault for everything", but you won't actually learn anything. Everything about men is explained by "when we were cavemen..." which may have been true half a million years ago but we've evolved quite a bit since then.
Every communication problem is explained by "superior multitasking women talk in multiple tones on multiple subjects" while men are "monotracking simpletons" who are utterly baffled by constantly changing subjects. That's great, if women are so superior how is it that they have such great difficulties explaining things to men ? On page 174 is an excellent case study of a woman giving a business presentation, she panics and starts swiftly changing subjects. If I was sat in on that presentation I would have been convinced that she had no confidence indicating potential problems, however, the book presents this as 'Marie was the classic victim'. Victim ? She fumbled the presentation and messed up. The rather tepid implication being that her sales talk failed because of some misogynist reason. And the book's explanation for why women talk in this way? - because you were all once cavewomen. Great, that helps a lot.
My final gripe (I have many more but I don't want to bore you) is with chapter 12: Why Men Lie. The start of this chapter says "everyone lies, if you don't you are an antisocial misfit" - an idea I completely reject, followed by "women lie just as much as men" - OK that sounds reasonable, but then the chapter ends with a dictionary of "male lies". I guess this is meant to be an attempt at humour but it seems to me just the usual old hackneyed stereotypes - you can get this kind of humour on the internet for free.
Final Word: I might not be a very good reviewer but if you've made it this far then you have absolutely no need to read this book! I just saved you £7.99, or in my case ¥1575 - which I'd very much like back, if refunds for bad books were possible.
Note: none of the above quoted phrases are direct quotes, I've paraphrased a bit.