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By Hal Urban

Fireside - 2004

Dedicated teachers deserve all the credit in the world. And as a person who taught and motivated secondary students for 30 years, Hal Urban deserves tons and tons of credit. Even more credit should come his way if he were to maintain his focus on pedagogy and not burden readers with books such as this offering.

The title is liable to attract someone believing that they will learn something about words: their origins; the nuances of their meanings; the impact of their intelligent construction into sentences and paragraphs. But the book turns out to be a self-improvement volume about the nice results that can be achieved by saying nice things to people. Not that we shouldn’t say nice things to people. It’s just that everything Urban says has been said before in the 1937 Dale Carnegie classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Why not get directions from the definitive source?