Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision
by Thom Hartmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Thom HartmannEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-01
ISBN: 1576754588
Number of pages: 220
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Book Reviews of Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision
Book Review: Don't Look Now - It's NLP!
Summary: 3 Stars
The have long been rumours in the NLP community that certain politicians and their supporters have been getting training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming in order to use it in their public communications.
Contrary to the misconception in certain quarters that "NLP doesn't work", here we have detailed evidence to show how much it is indeed being used to shape the politics of the USA. In short, the book is, in fact, a basic introduction to a number of NLP-related concepts, primarily as they apply to political communications.
It has certain limitations, mainly to do with the author's confused and often downright inaccurate statements about neurophysiology. For example, the material about the so-called "triune brain" is out of date (you'll have trouble finding a recent neuroscience textbook that still uses this term/explanation), and contrary to the claim at the top of page 59, input via the nose goes directly from receptors in the nasal passage to the olfactory bulbs of the brain - NOT via the so-called "reptillian brain."
Fortunately these elements of the book can be (and IMO should be) ignored in their entirety without missing out on the genuinely important/useful information.
A more serious limitation, at first glance, is the way that the author actually utilises the same techniques as those he complains of when used by the Republicans he is seemingly so opposed to. Moreover he does it so blatantly if I were a Republican I'd be thanking my lucky stars for such an unambiguous demonstration of the negative attitudes and behaviour that (as a Brit) I perceive the hard right in the US attributes to its "liberal" opponents.
On page 143, for example, we read:
"Abortion opponents to that 'pro-life' frame [from the anti capital punishment lobbyists] and repurposed it as a 'forced pregnancy' frame."
Now (again as an outsider), I've never gotten the message that the anti-abortionists were actually trying to force anyone to get pregnant. So the phraseology is already pretty dodgy, though at least the words in doubt are enclosed in quote marks.
On page 151, however, the gloves come off and we read:
"For example, I did my radio program live from the Republical National Convention in New York in 2004. A leading proponent of forced pregnancy sat in front of me ..."
Suddenly the quote marks are removed and the author imposes his own personal perception of the pro-life advocate with nothing to indicate the imposition.
Yet despite the unrelentingly liberal slant to this book, and the occasional errors, I would still give it a limited recommendation. Because the techniques are real and people on all sides of the political debate need to be aware of these techniques and how they are being used on a still largely unsuspecting public. And not only in America.
It also gives the "unsuspecting public" a chance to get clued up.
In NLP these techniques were originally unearthed (in some cases) and created (in others) in order to help people to communicate more effectively.
It is sad, but quite frankly inevitable, that the techniques are now being used - by ALL shades of political opinion, not to mention advertisers and the media in general - to manipulate and hoodwink the rest of the population. The advantage of reading this particular book is both that you get the overt information AND that you can apply what you've learnt (about communication) to the text you've learnt them from to see how you are being manipulated even as you read it. ;-)
BTW, if you want to "read on" after you finish this introduction you can search Amazon for books on NLP/neuro-linguistic programming, or check out more than 170 book reviews on my own website.
Andrew Bradbury
Honest Abe's NLP Emporium
More Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision reviews:
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