Customer Rating:  
Summary: lessons on mingling
Comment: Jean Martinet has written an entertaining book on techniques for improving one's everyday interactions in the setting of social gatherings. Martinet provides suggestions on everything from joining a group of strangers, to recovering from the embarrassing faux pas, to fleeing encounters with the obnoxious and boring. "Mingling" is a good complement to "How to Work a Room" by Susan Roane. While Roane focuses more on the etiquette of business interactions, Martinet aims at the brief, surface small talk we all must engage in as we go about our lives. Still, some of the techniques described can be employed for facilitating teams as well. There is not any deep psychology here, but the "The Art of Mingling" is a good, quick read with does not take itself too seriously.
Customer Rating:
Summary: How to Act Like an Airhead
Comment: If you want to act like Phoebe from FRIENDS, then this is your bible. Otherwise, avoid it. The jist of this is lie, manipulate and generally behave like a ditzy deb. Oh, and it's utterly useless for even the most effeminate men. I honestly did not find even one thing in it's entirety that I could use, and as a business man and church security staff, I mingle constantly. If she ever got invited back to parties based on this behavior, it was probably for laffs.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Only for those with true social disabilities
Comment: Sure, the techniques are all proven; even the most dedicated introvert has learned most of these by college. If you're a fairly average person looking to improve your game, this isn't the place to go; you'll find nothing new. In fact, you'll find everything to be almost insultingly basic.
If you truly have a challenging time with almost any group social situation -- and I'm not putting anyone down here, that describes some of my friends, but it's not the average person or even the person one standard deviation below average -- then you'll find this book has those tips that you find everyone else in the room knows, and you wondered how you missed them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: ok
Comment: this book was decent. it did have some funny stuff in it. but, i think being funny always helps ease situations where your uncomfortable in mingling. its worth it for some of the tips it gave. but, some or outdated/corny that you would look stupid nowdays if you used them. so, dont take everything verbatum
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not as good as I had hoped
Comment: I liked the introduction, in which the author talked about her friends asking her how she had managed to talk to everyone at the event they had just been at, while they had failed to mingle. She does give a few useful tips in the book, but don't buy this book if mingling is not, for you, an end in itself, as it is for the author. If, for example, you want to improve your mingling skills in order to make friends, this book won't help at all. The book might help you learn to meet everyone in a room, spending 30 seconds or one minute on each person, but the sorts of things she suggests you say to people made me cringe. Her system will help you meet people who are the most confident and who are fellow mingling lovers, but if you want to put people at ease so that you can discover who might be someone with whom you might like to create a friendship, her suggestions will prove counterproductive. If you want to mingle to make friends (or at least not to destroy any hope of making a friend or two) read the excellent book by Don Gabor, How To Start A Conversation And Make Friends. Finally, The Art of Mingling actually makes the author sound rather shallow, silly and even narcissistic (and believe me, I have nothing against finding ways to get away from the party bore with bad breath who has you cornered, etc). Disappointing, unless, for you, mingling is an end in itself.
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