Author:  Debra Fine
ISBN Number:  1-4013-0226-2
Publisher:  Hyperion

If you skip holiday parties or hide behind bushes at the company picnic because you’re suffering from shyness and / or foot-in-mouth disease, The Fine Art of Small Talk may be the most important book you’ll ever read.

Author Debra Fine claims that she is an “enginerd” by nature – someone who is timid, socially awkward, and chat-illiterate. Recognizing the importance of being able to initiate and sustain conversations with near strangers in every area from social settings to job interviews, Fine wisely taught herself how to break out of the introvert’s protective bubble and did it so well that she now teaches seminars based on the system of conversational comfort she devised.

In The Fine Art of Small Talk, she offers up an abundance of tips, motivations, and “cheats” that have works for her and for hundreds of participants in her seminars. She covers the basic up front -- how to make introductions to how to join a conversation in progress and how to politely extricate yourself from an uncomfortable one, what to do when you’ve forgotten a name and how to remember names so the same problem won’t crop up again.

Pointing to the importance of meaningful dialog in both business and social networking rather than just how’s-the-weather chit chat, Fine provides a nicely proportioned list of icebreakers for a number of different situations and settings. While these starter lines as they are presented here may bseem stilted and stiff, they can easily be modified to slide smoothly and naturally into a variety of contexts. The lists are well-balanced by pertinent and encouraging anecdotes to remind the shyest of readers that we are not alone in our fears.

Fine’s book goes beyond motivation and inspiration, however. She includes advice for pre-emptive measures that will aid the reader in identifying and coping with conversational criminals such as the interrogator, the braggart, and the one-upper, explains how to offer a compliment, and provides warm up exercises that even the shyest of us can tackle.

Perhaps the most important sections of the book deal with the importance of listening. For those who truly are terrified by the thought of speaking to strangers, it will come as very good news to learn that, by merely listening properly, we may be mistaken for great conversationalists. Whether you’re a wallflower yearning for a makeover or an extrovert eager to improve your social skills, The Fine Art of Small Talk is guaranteed to give you a burst of promise and enthusiasm.

The above review was contributed by: Deborah Adams who is an award-winning novelist and poet. By day she grows organic vegetables and by night she dances with a Latin beat.