This valuable and nonacademic guide reveals the extent to which we are surrounded by persuasion, and how
we can resist. Levine (A Geography of Time), a professor of psychology at Cal State Fresno, opens by
demonstrating that all of us (including himself) can be persuaded under the right circumstances. He goes
on to study financial manipulation and the use of the sense of obligation (which exists in all cultures, even if
it is most strongly visible in Japan), and then proceeds to a nuts-and-bolts analysis of salesmanship by
describing what he learned and did (and had done to him) as an automobile salesman. He offers an admirably
concise and unemotional analysis of the famous Milgram experiment, involving the (claimed) administration
of ever-stronger electric shocks to test the impulse to obedience. Inevitably, he moves to cults, the Moonies
and the ultimate persuasion horror story, Jonestown. Not so inevitably, he avoids hysteria and demonization,
even of Jim Jones, and points out that brute force is required at the extreme end of the persuasion spectrum.
Levine's final chapter offers ways of dealing with unwelcome persuasion while remaining part of a society in
which some persuasion is part of almost any social interaction. The final results are bout as far as possible
from the shrill Hidden Persuaders tradition or the cult deprogrammers who become cult gurus themselves --
and quite persuasive about the author's credentials, common sense and ethics.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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