Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss

The utter bloody rudeness of the world today, or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door.

Lynne Truss continues her saga by leaving the good pandas to eat their shoots, and stepping outside her door to teach the world a lesson in manners. However, while her lesson has reached grammatical perfection it is little more than a published rant.

The book is split into six sections where Truss delves into specific areas of manners that are sadly lacking. She explores both the effect on society and her personal feelings in each area, pointing out many problems and offering no solutions. She has given up on the hope of changing the world, but does wonder what brought about this onslaught of disrespect in our era.

Truss offers several good insights into why our world is falling apart, and I defiantly enjoyed the last section of her book where she explains how society has set up rules for getting along with one another, and these rules are called manners. I found this particularly interesting when compared to modern thoughts presented about religion by the secular world at large.

I know I am deviating from anything to do with the actual book, but this is the main thing I got from reading it. Many people will argue that religion has come about as man's way of organizing a system for all of us to get along. With a code of ethics we are able to survive as a species.

However, I found it interesting that this is exactly what Truss says about manners. Good manners are man's structure for knowing how interact with one another. The higher call to morality is something else that God Himself has put inside of every person. Man kind ultimately doesn't care so much about getting along, as each man cares about himself. This is what has brought manners into their current sad state of affairs.