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Also by Thomas Blaikie:

To the Manner Born, October 2006
Hardcover

TO THE MANNER BORN
By: Thomas Blaikie

A Most Proper Guide to Modern Civility

Villard
October 2006
On Sale: October 10, 2006
224 pages
ISBN: 0812976592
EAN: 9780812976595
Hardcover
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Self-Help | Non-Fiction

Your friends neglect to RSVP to your party invitation . . . co-workers munch their pungent meals near your office . . . pedestrians shout into their cell phones and practically knock you to the pavement.

Wishing that friends, family, colleagues, and oblivious strangers would mind their manners is lovely, but what about your own? You don’t mean to be rude, but in today’s carefree, high-tech, fast-paced world, how are you supposed to know what to do?

Thankfully, Englishman Thomas Blaikie’s witty and insightful guide will help you steer through this minefield of uncertainty and back onto the path toward civility–without a lot of fuss and bother. No need to worry about the proper way to eat soup or which is the salad fork. What Blaikie teaches you is more important: how and when to drop in on a friend, how to turn down suitors graciously, how to “move on” at a party, how to end a text-message conversation that’s gone on just a bit too long, and how to cope with myriad other twenty-first-century social traumas. Always positive and cheerful, To the Manner Born offers commonsense, practical solutions. And if you don’t like someone else’s manners, yes, you really should try to do something about it–in the nicest way possible, of course.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - November 17, 2006