This book contains many useful general guidelines for understanding your own needs and properly communicating them to other people. It provides tools for increasing your empathy with other people by properly questioning them, to ascertain what their particular needs are. While I would recommend this book to people who have problems communicating, it is merely an unscientific overview of Rosenberg's own particular style of communication, which he has dubbed (I would say erroneously) Nonviolent Communication. There are no diatribes about why philosophical non-violence or pacifism should be adopted or what that exactly that means. My only working hypothesis so far is that he's named this communication style for its connotation. By naming it thus, he can have people with names like Arun Gandhi write introductions for him.
This book should be renamed Empathic Communication, so we're not drawn to any false associations. Further, this book is filled to the brim with anecdotes and very little references to psychological books. There's about two and half pages of bibliography and roughly half are not psychologically or scientifically based. There is a strong undercurrent of woo which never really overflows to the surface, with general references to "the soul" and "spiritual communion". Despite these flaws, I still found the read interesting enough to finish and even though I won't apply many of the principles in verbal communication I will still internally practice a few. I could see the use in recommending this book to people who have problems communicating their emotions.
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