The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease

Do you often turn people off, and you don't know why? Or make moves on women who turn out to be completely uninterested in you? Do you want to be able to get people to believe you are on the same page as them, actually say it in a way other than words? The Definitive Book of Body Language is here to help!

Here you will learn to read other people's bodies as well as their words, all that they are saying, and not saying. You'll be able to tell when people are not only not open to your ideas, but completely hostile to them, and even how you can change their minds by using a process called mirroring- but you have to be careful, as out of sync mirroring is worse than not trying it at all.

A girl may be looking at a guy, but how can you tell if she's actually interested, or merely giving him her attention? This book shows you the way. It is mainly intended for Men, as women tend to be much better at "decoding" noverbal information. But that's not to say all women completely get it, so if you're a woman, and don't always understand the emotional currents in a room, this book can also help you.

The book starts with the bare basics, and shows how handshakes can often be powerplays (overly firm grips that turning into finger-crushing pain, or the person who shakes so hard you feel that your hand is the pump handle and he expects to see water come gushing from your mouth...), and moves on from there, covering the arms, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, legs and feet, plus all-over Postures and use of the head and chin.

You'll learn to recognize false smiles and other lying behaviors and gestures, and how to tell when a man or women is really interested in someone else. In the back of the book are pictures which you can use to put to the test what you have learned.

This book is unusual, and I found it very interesting, especially the part on sexual attraction signals and mirroring. It's very complete, including smoking gestures and those with glasses. However, it would take more than a single reading of the book to really incorporate the information it imparts into practice. This is the kind of book to read more than once, to read over and over again, a chapter at a time and then go out and people-watch to see if you can put the insights to work.

While there are a number of photographs, most of the illustrations in the books are drawings, and I think they would have been better shown with real people, because real people are harder to read than simple drawings are. Drawings are okay for the first steps, but to really understand, you need to peoplewatch, and actual pictures would have conveyed what you are really going to see much better.

This book fascinated me, and I even recommended it to my boss for her management class because of the part of the book that covered mirroring, and about the placement and seating of people around a table to create intimacy and seem less confrontational. I also recommend it to anyone else who wants to understand their fellow humans better.