Jul 012014
 

Cover for Amy Alkon's Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say Fuck. Plain white cover with black and red text above a silverware setting of a knife, spoon, and fork. The fork's middle tine is longer than the rest, so it's flipping the bird.The New York Times has a profile of Amy Alkon and her book Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck.

We live in a world that’s very different from the one in which Emily Post came of age. Many of us who are nice (but who also sometimes say “f*ck”) are frequently at a loss for guidelines about how to be a good person who deals effectively with the increasing onslaught of rudeness we all encounter. 

To lead us out of the miasma of modern mannerlessness, science-based and bitingly funny syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon rips the doily off the manners genre and gives us a new set of rules for our twenty-first century lives. 

With wit, style, and a dash of snark, Alkon explains that we now live in societies too big for our brains, lacking the constraints on bad behavior that we had in the small bands we evolved in. Alkon shows us how we can reimpose those constraints, how we can avoid being one of the rude, and how to stand up to those who are.