Carnegie's great achievement is making common courtesy sound like a revolutionary discovery.

How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of those books whose title promises considerably more manipulation than its contents actually deliver. Published in 1936, it is a practical guide to human relations built around listening, appreciation, persuasion without needless confrontation and the rather radical proposition that other people have feelings too. Its methods are simple, sometimes almost embarrassingly so, but simplicity is precisely the point.

Carnegie's prose is brisk, colloquial and relentlessly conversational. The revised edition describes his voice as “brash, breezy” and intensely exuberant, with Carnegie writing much as he spoke. That assessment feels exact. He does not write from a lectern. He writes as though he has cornered you after dinner and is determined to explain, with several anecdotes, why your last argument was entirely unnecessary.

The sentences are short, emphatic and engineered for retention. Carnegie likes headings that sound like commands, principles that can be reduced to a memorable phrase, and stories that convert an abstract lesson into something immediately usable. The Guardian has noted the book's folksy wisdom and systematic structure, while acknowledging how strongly its 1930s style and examples date it.

The weakness is repetition, and there is rather a lot of it. Carnegie discovers a useful principle, illustrates it with a story, restates it, then discovers it again several chapters later wearing a different hat. The anecdotes initially give the prose warmth and momentum, but their accumulation eventually makes the book feel less like an argument than an especially enthusiastic sermon with an index.

There is also a peculiar tension in the writing. Carnegie insists on sincerity while teaching readers techniques for producing particular responses in other people. The distinction matters, and he knows it matters, but the prose cannot entirely resolve it. At its most cynical, the book can sound as though kindness is valuable partly because it works.

Still, I will grant Carnegie one unguarded pleasure: he is genuinely good at making decency sound practical rather than pious. His optimism may be excessive, but it is rarely dull. Beneath the salesmanship is a surprisingly humane conviction that people become easier to understand once you stop treating them as obstacles.

The prose is dated, repetitive and occasionally breathless. It is also remarkably clear about what it wants the reader to remember.

Verdict: a relentlessly cheerful manual whose sentences may bruise the modern reader's sophistication, but whose basic courtesy remains annoyingly difficult to dismiss.