I would recommend this book to a writer, poet, intellect, psychologist, or anyone interested in human interaction. The reason I bought this was because of a cliff-hanger review on Slate.com. The hook is that this book will help you to identify a liar from a non-liar by detecting cues found in the pronouns one uses in conversation. This turned out to be so much more than that. What's interesting to me as a poet is Pennebaker's study of suicidal poet's use of the "I". In some ways I feel like he is talking to me directly, warning me against using this pronoun. I've always had a goal to write a series of poems without using the "I", but it's difficult, I'm not sure why.

Regardless, this book will make you aware of the words you use everyday, especially the really small words, but also how you interact with different people and how these interactions affect how others perceive you. And though I took Psychology 101 three times in college, I'm not a psychologist, and even I can easily grasp the jargon and data presented in this book. I've still got some reading to do, but my one gripe is how he quickly jumps from one topic to the next. Just when I'm really getting into something juicy, he drops it and moves on. This could be a positive criticism, but for a book this long, I think he could have done a bit more lingering, but perhaps the book itself is some skewed brain pattern test for the reader.