A Review of Stan Toler’s “The Power of Positive Words”
Say Something Good
It’s sad to say, but a book with the title The Power of Positive Words could not be more needed in the day and age of Donald Trump. To that end, Stan Toler’s non-fiction tome is an advice book that is much appreciated. Even without resorting to extreme examples, such as I did in the first sentence in this paragraph, everyone could stand to benefit from being more positive in words because, after all, as Toler points out, those who speak powerfully and positively are much happier and better human beings. So here I am, the reviewer, the critique-r, being asked to offer my opinion on a book with conservative Christian leanings. (How conservative? Toler tells stories of the good-naturedness of former Presidents, and not one of them was a Democrat I think.) I shall wade carefully into these waters and offer a review that, hopefully, doesn’t sting the author but only the mere words on the page of this book.
What’s good about it? Well, if you were to be in a trivia league with an upcoming event focused on the topic of positivity in words, this book would be good fodder for training yourself to learn all sorts of stories and trivia that would help you and your team win the game. This book is chock full of interesting tidbits that you could drop into conversation: how Mother Theresa controlled her attitude, how Lincoln upended liars, how people who became paralyzed from various accidents in their teens found positive things about their lives after their accidents. Clearly, this book is a conversation starter.
If you’ll indulge me in a personal story, reading this book even helped me out with something that was immediately worrisome to me. Now, I’m a contractor for a government corporation, meaning that I really have two bosses — one of which pays the bills, my contracting firm. I got an email from my contracting firm while reading this book telling me that I had forgotten to fill out my electronic timesheet (which I did not forget, it was filled out) and I was going to have my pay affected by this. You can imagine the startling email that I sent back in response to this IN ALL CAPS for emphasis, not really meant to be yelling. Still, I thought about this book’s adage that the best people are those who are quick to apologize. So I did, and it turned out that my firm was in the wrong — they sent the email to the wrong person — and the receiver of my all caps email just shrugged things off. And, next time, I’ll use italics.
However, as good as the book may be in helping you navigate the day-to-day nature of life, there are a number of faults with it. First, it covers a pretty huge amount of material, so you go from merely filtering your words to changing your attitude and more as topics. It is as though the book, at times, bites off more than it can chew. Which leads to my second point, the book is mostly stories (that are interesting, yes) and very little practical advice. What advice there is seems thrown together and is perfunctory. Thirdly, this is a book from a small Christian publisher; however, there’s not a whole lot of Christian content in the book — save from a cloying evangelical message to convert non-believers at the very end of the volume. I really couldn’t see how this type of book was being published by the publisher because this sort of thing could be readily handled by the secular press. (Who may have been a little bit more judicious in terms of editing the book so that it resolved some of the other points I bring up in this paragraph.)
So it’s hard to really gauge what the purpose of the book is. I certainly didn’t turn to it expecting to find comfort and solace as I normally would a Christian book. I didn’t find that an a-ha! moment really existed for me here — with the example I just gave a couple of paragraphs ago notwithstanding. It was a nice, pleasant read, sure, but it had all of the substance of a very lengthy newspaper article of the self-help variety. Or an infographic. There wasn’t much here that wasn’t already common sense, and there wasn’t much originality in terms of getting this into print– as the author basically endlessly quotes from other sources. Thus, throw all of those things together, and I’m not really entirely sure what the point of this book is. I guess it’s a book to be read by Christians who really don’t like reading because the structure of this thing was so loosey-goosey that it literally read like, “Here’s something interesting I read; now here’s another thing that’s interesting; one more thing that’s interesting that you should know about; now you should do this, this and this.”
In the end, I’d give The Power of Positive Words a mildly passing grade. Despite its flaws, it does have good intentions behind it. I like that it gets people a little bit more aware of the language that their using and rather than throw a bunch of Bible quotes at you to change your behaviour, it suggests that change — real change — must come from the inside first. While that’s not entirely new or novel as a thought, people do need the reminder every now and then, so they can really think about how and when they’re going to turn over a new leaf. To that point, The Power of Positive Words is somewhat successful as a tome. It could have been much deeper as a read, and its breezy writing style suggests that the book is all surface and not much more. Still, what we’ve got isn’t an abomination, though it could have been structurally edited a bit more to my liking as some of the transitions are wonky, but I digress. Any book that gets you to try and be a kinder, softer critic can’t be a bad thing. Can it?
Stan Toler’s The Power of Positive Words: What You Say Makes a Difference will be published by Harvest House Publishers on March 12, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
