People Watching
(Desmond Morris)
Sometimes we casually pick up a book and four hours later find ourselves unable to put it down. The plot keeps our attention, the dialogue is riveting, and the characters are engaging. How do we make a character engaging and credible? With words,yes, and appropriate body language. If our character was saying something sad and smiling or dancing at the same time, unless the author had made the reasons for such behaviour clear, we would certainly find that character odd and the writer would lose her credibility as a professional storyteller. In the same way, the actions we perform have to be in accordance with the words we utter or our interlocutor will classify us as odd or eccentric and our credibility would lose points. Politicians are masters at combining words with appropriate body language that defines their status and give the electorate confidence in his abilities. Of course all these gestures are made-believe; they confir a message to the audience, one that is often untrue and in conflict with the speaker's personality. Our actions say as much about us as our words. So how do we get to read the silent messages that our speaker doesn't want us to know and often tries to conceal?
Desmond Morris has been a 'people-watcher' for the good part of forty years gaining initial experience as a zoo keeper and progessing to studying people behaviour that culminated in the bestselling book The Naked Ape in 1967. People Watching is an updated version of Manwatching first published in 1977. The book deals with every aspect of the human behaviour be it discovered, absorbed, or trained action plus the body language we adopt with friends, colleagues, subordinates, superiors, lovers and, for some of us, the audience.
People Watching is an indispensable guide to anyone whose work involve the correct use of human body language, such as writers, or wants to know more about their fellow human beings and understand what they are really telling us.
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