[.ca] A Short History Of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and ... (ISBN 0312263899)

From Amazon.com:
If Americans value civility and good manners so much, then why have they made celebrities out of people like Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and Dennis Rodman? How is it that political discourse came to be dominated by discussions of semen-stained dresses and mutual accusations of immorality and civic unfitness? Is the United States a nation of hypocrites? No, suggests Mark Caldwell, it's just really confused. "We want to be free, but we long for restraint," he writes. "We insist on openness and cringe when we get it; we strain at trivial offenses and swallow camels of iniquity." A Short History of Rudeness flits around the obsession with good manners and moral behavior, touching upon a number of aspects of public life (the workplace, mass transit, the Internet) and private (child rearing, home design, sexual politics). Along the way, Caldwell strings together an array of primary sources--including newspaper articles, business etiquette manuals, and South Park episodes--that help explain why people pay attention to Martha Stewart, whether Dr. Spock is really responsible for multiple generations of spoiled brats, and how users of the Internet developed a blunt discourse that, while superficially crude, exhibits a desire for decorum at its core. (Why do we feel justified in flaming spammers? Because they violate our sense of privacy.) The cultural obsession with manners and morality unfolds as part of a deeper anxiety over class. While the individual sections of A Short History of Rudeness are not always revelatory, Caldwell's slow but steady approach is at least innovative in the particular way he chooses to fit together these pieces of the social puzzle. --Ron Hogan

this book has made me more polite, ha ha:
now I'm going to be polite to everybody. woohoo

Witty and accessible:
Completely free of the elitism and moralizing that you usually find in etiquette books, Caldwell bypasses the usual bemoaning of how low our standards are, and instead concentrates on how, when, and why standards of polite behavior have changed over the years.

Misleading Subtitle:
No matter Caldwell's argument for focusing--almost exclusively--on New York City (it's easier to research NYC, he says on the last page of the intro), his subtitle suggests a wider range. James and Wharton have told us more about NYC manners than Caldwell, trapped inside nonfiction's perimeters and by a bloodless style, can approach. Looking to the rest of the United States, then, would have had the meritorious effect of opening his topic up beyond the much-overdone.

It's really a history of politeness!:
Those expecting a savory collation of anecdotes about rudeness, ancient and modern, will be disappointed. Even Jerry Springer is only mentioned briefly in passing! The book is really about the history of good manners (actually, about the history of books about manners) over the centuries. Witty and amusing in places, but it often degenerates into brief summaries of other books (actually, I found its chief value was the pointers it gave to other, and more interesting, books on manners).

A Nothingburger:
This is a sloppy pastiche of -- well, not much. Some old issues of Ladies' Home Journal, some comments on undertakers' prices (!), comments on the development of Internet flaming, some anecdotes about children...it tries very hard to be a grand unifying survey, tying everything together and leading to fresh new insights, but just flops. The author has nothing new to say, doesn't know much about what he writes abouit, and has a tedious style. Likes to use words like "tergiversations" out of context. As interesting as tepid oatmeal. Buy Paul Fussel's "Class" or "The Tipping Point" instead; either is infinitely more entertaining, interesting and better written.