Hacker News Books

Highly recommend "You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation" by Deborah Tannen. Tannen is a professor of linguistics. What you just describe is one of the typical difference in communication styles between men and women. Her other book "That's not what I meant" is also a good read.

"He Said, She Said by Deborah Tannen is a layperson's guide to gender communications."

I would actually recommend "You Just Don't Understand" by the same author about how men and women talk to each other. Valuable in ways you cannot imagine.

You could try reading Deborah Tannen's classic You Just Don't Understand. I used to recommend it to everyone in a relationship I met! It's about different communication styles of men and women (and a lot more). Her previous book That's Not What I Meant! was about different communication styles of different cultures, but everyone was so interested in the gender chapter she wrote a great book about that. Epic insights on every page.

Sure. She has numerous books now, but the first one that started her off on this path was _That's Not What I Meant!_, which was about differences in communications styles in general. One chapter of it was about the diff. b/t men and women and that got the most attention and requests for more info, so she wrote _You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation_. (There's a lesson for startups about listening to your audience there, too.)

The main one to recommend is the latter, but the first one is great, too. I haven't read her other ones. And TBH I haven't finished either one after several months, b/c the material in the first few chapters just got me so far along I was surprised and it shifted my perspective quite a bit. Especially for a literally-minded person like myself, it was like learning to see not only a new color, but a new, parallel spectrum.

All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter.

Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages.

Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from.

Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc

Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed.

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life.

Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind.

Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C

Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy

Noam Chomsky's political books

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful - the world, development, government, planning, organization, humanity, sustainability

J.R. Saul, Voltaire's Bastards - power, history, democracy, technocracy, reason, rationality, history from late 18th C until today.

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 - the anti-industrialist tradition, politics, culture, society and the new language describing these things

Clifford Pickover, Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty - programming, mathematics, art, fractals, dynamical systems etc

Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility - hard to explain, kind of advanced self-help, the magic of changing attitudes, expectations, habits.

My favourite non-fiction books of all time, though, are the essays of Emerson, Hazlitt, RL Stevenson, GK Chesterton, Santayana, Bertrand Russell. And the books of Nietzsche, SARK and Robert Fulghum.

Washington Talk; Prickly Roots of 'Homeland Security'
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/us/washington-talk-prickl...

>''People find it a little quaint, a little forced,'' said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and author of ''You Just Don't Understand'' (William Morrow, 1990).

>At worst, Ms. Tannen said, the phrase is associated with sinister historical precedents.

>''There is one particular group -- American Jews, and I am Jewish -- for whom it has a menacing association,'' she said.

>Nazis favored the word ''heimat,'' or ''homeland,'' and homeland defense forces were known as Heimwehr or Heimatschutz in Austria and Germany from the late 1920's.