I think the audible guided review was pretty good, so let me just paste the same information here, but with a few additions.

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I don’t have so many native English speaking friends who aren’t constantly thinking about everything around them.

I know lots of people that aren’t thinking about many of the things mentioned in this book all the time but they’re not actually friends, so recommending such a book would be condescending.

I would however, recommend this book to acquaintances who are from vastly different cultures than me, for example Chinese colleagues, South East Asian friends… because from what i’ve observed they’re not often thinking about all these nuances and subtleties.  Especially if they were having to work with Westerners in the future.

What was most disappointing about The Great Courses’s story?

Not really disappointing in any way.  I got this book to see if there was anything that i could learn, but wasn’t really that disappointed when there wasn’t much to learn.

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

To be fair, the lecturer really DOES go through the lessons with examples and explains the reason why very clearly.  I think that would definitely help a lot of people.  I appreciated how thorough she was in explaining why each point was important

Was How Conversation Works: 6 Lessons for Better Communication worth the listening time?

Yes, it was only 3 hrs 8 mins long.  Even though most people should be familiar with the concepts, the lady explained it with enthusiasm and patience.  A lot of lecture audio books can be quite boring, but this one managed to keep my interest.

—

My own additional notes?

To me, a lot of it seems common sense, I’ve been told I ‘think too much’ which means a lot of the things this professor points out…I’m actually already thinking about.  However i was still keen to listen to the whole thing because if there was something I could learn…then of course that would be welcome.

In fact, from my experience, constantly thinking about all these things can be detrimental to your conversation, because you’re constantly wondering how others will perceive it.  On one hand, it allows you to be very diplomatic, and actually convince others of your point of view, but on the other hand, if you’ve unfortunately misjudged someone’s intelligence, and by that I mean their intelligence is below what you assumed it was, then you can miss out on some simplicity and gains because they just aren’t thinking that far ahead.   Sometimes there’s no reason to be diplomatic, because a particular person just isn’t thinking about inferred meanings, specifics of words… all this kind of stuff.

As stated at the top of this article… I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to any of my friends or family, because I believe that they’re already aware of many of the things stated in this book.

That being said, I would recommend this book to non-native English speakers who might not be totally accustomed to the way Western people think.

Listen to an audio sample here: http://www.audible.com/pd/Self-Development/How-Conversation-Works-6-Lessons-for-Better-Communication-Audiobook/B00DEK2G46/ref=a_search_c4_1_1_srTtl?qid=1487540374&sr=1-1

There’s meant to be an advert below which is a link for you to get 2 free audio books….if you can’t see it, ‘allow ads’ or ‘disable adblocker’ from your adblocker software on this website.

Happy listening!

If not… then click this link:
Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks