The Definitive Book of Body Language - Book Review in 2 minutes

Pease, Allan & Barbara (2004), The Definitive Book of Body Language, London: Orion Books Ltd

The Definitive Book of Body Language is a textbook. It is not on the light read site of the shelf, content over readability. Allan and Barbara Pease first published the book back in 2004, and it seems like an offline Wikipedia for body language.

The book is divided into 19 chapters and builds up from the basic to more complex contextual understanding. I wrote down the entire content at the bottom of the article if you are interested. They start with general perception, not body language-based, to raise awareness and then gradually go more to explicit examples, discuss interpretation and using body language in business.

They cover what you might expect, with a surprisingly large portion focusing on the business perspective, discussing territory, seatings, building rapport, using and reading accessories and how to learn to read such clusters of signals.

For each chapter, they use a mixture of explicit gestures and descriptions. For instance, chapter 11 covers thirteen common gestures that we see daily and how to think about them. One example is the leaning backwards and spreading your legs move that we love when guys do it during rush hour in public transport.

In the penultimate chapters, they address seating positions and powerplay, politics, and being in control of your emotions, which I found by far the best and most valuable part of the book.

In general, I would say that what they do is raise awareness about you becoming aware of the signals you send. And they make a fair point about signals that men & women send differently and how the perception may be more important than reading others body language per se.

In this, I see the strength and probably also the weakness of the book.

On the one hand, you become more self-aware when reading this, and a ton of little hints and tricks work really well, like the seating positions and open or attractive gestures.

On the other hand, you can become excruciatingly self-aware when you do read this book.

I do dislike that the approaches are pretty much entirely western-centric, even the section about cultural differences. These parts often seem like they are a bit outdated. And in general, women are more portrayed to focus on sexual and submissive gestures, so not really a course of body language for women, in my opinion. You might also get the feeling that male positions are superior in almost every situation, as the book is written in a way that seems to support such a point of view.

To be fair, the book states that it is the result of 30 years of their work, so it also reads a bit like a collection of various articles and works about the topic from different stages during their career. Which also might explain why you might sigh at the difficulty of finding the adequate reference at the end of the book, as they are listed alphabetically. This left the academic part of my soul to groan in desperation.

All in all, I give it a 2 out of five. There is excellent advice in the book and the ideas, approaches, and examples are well-illustrated. The sections about seating, powerplay and cluster and so on are very well written and informative. Thus, I think it is definitely worth to have that overview and that is why I have it in the book store section.

There are some bits here and there that are outdated. To say the least. For instance, one section states that German and British people are disciplined and mirror people more than other cultures: That is why they dominated the world for many years (chapter 12). I had to laugh at that. What would that make Swiss and Japanese people? Do we secretly dominate the world? I guess.

There are newer versions coming out every now and then, I am sure they keep reworking the book and take out blunders like these.

Anyway, thanks for your time

Cheers

Oliver