Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America's Original Vision | 
| Author: Thom Hartmann
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 41588
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 220
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 1576754588
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.973014
EAN: 9781576754580
ASIN: 1576754588
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
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Product Description
Millions of working Americans talk, act, and vote as if their economic interests match those of the megawealthy, global corporations, and the politicians who do their bidding. How did this happen? According to Air America radio host Thom Hartmann, the apologists of the Right have become masters of the subtle and largely subconscious aspects of political communication. It's not an escalation in Iraq, it's a surge; it's not the inheritance tax, it's the death tax; it's not drilling for oil, it's exploring for energy. Conservatives didn't intuit the path to persuasive messaging; they learned these techniques. There is no reason why progressives can't learn them too. In Cracking the Code, Hartmann shows you how. Drawing on his background as a psychotherapist and advertising executive as well as a national radio host, he breaks down the structure for effective communication, sharing exercises and examples for practical application.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Take back your power. Take back your country. July 6, 2008
This is Tom Hartmann's best and most indispensable book. In his last book, Screwed, he talked about how Republicans and right-wingers have screwed middle-class and working-class Americans. This book tells you how you can bring back the American Dream for yourself, for your family, and for your community. Stop subsidizing pampered, corrupt, and useless CEOs and heiresses with your tax dollars and and earnings.
Cracking the Code: A Cure with Common Sense June 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's hard to say enough about this little gem. Hartmann is on to something here and we should listen to him. From Facebook to keeping a job is about communication and relationships, and this is what Hartmann understands best. This book will change your mind about a lot of things -- maybe even your life.
 What many of us sense, or something May 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'm such a kindred spirit of Hartmann's that I often think that I thought of what he says before he says it on Air America. As a writer, I found this book one that expresses in clear language many points that I thought I knew beforehand. But I never put them together logically the way he has. Since then, I've tried to use ideas in this book to guide me in writing some paragraphs that could be used in campaigning for sustainable living, and I've found that when you consciously use his techniques, you come up with something powerful. At one "group think" an acquaintance of mine objected that if convincing people is this kind of emotional exercise, he wants none of it. He prefers pounding people with "facts." Well, Hartmann has it right. We progressives need to sharpen our story. The only criticism I have of this book is that it is too facile. I hope that when the 2008 presidential campaign is over, he slows down and takes a long look at the psychological ebb and flow of it, and how the media abused the public and the candidates. He could come up with something very, very good.
Amazing book May 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found the book very informative and well written. I bought the book from Thom at a talk and am purchasing additional copies for friends. Everyone should learn the truth about how the masses are controlled and why we got to where we are today.
Gay Jones
An Essential Part of the Politician/Citizen's Campaign Bookshelf April 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Also add How to Win a Local Election, Third Edition and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition and Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.).
And of course, the little tome that inspired Thom, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives.
As ever, I begin the reviews with a list of typos and other barriers to communication. This volume is pretty clean.
On page 60 and again on page 146, Thom uses the word "pentaflex" to describe the robust metaphor he's building on "chunking" (not the city, but the NLP practice, "if you will," of ascending and descending the "frames" of communication. Well, manufacturer Esselte calls the hanging folders Pendaflex) folders. Unless Thom was trying to avoid getting into a copyright kind of thing, it's the wrong product name.
And a really easy one for an editor to miss, I guess, is this one on page 73, paragraph 2, describing and giving examples of how good speeches "anchor" words to highly emotive other words. The sentence goes, "And it ends with a call to action that also anchors Republican to assault."
I haven't figured out how to use HTML in these reviews--and perhaps we're not supposed to, but that last phrase, "Republican to assault" is ALL in italics. It SHOULD be "Republican" in italics, "to" in Roman, and "assault" in italics again, to read (in a non-italic environment), "anchors 'Republican' to 'assault'." A case of "anchors IN the way," perhaps?
I bring these lapses to folks' attention because I believe that they shouldn't appear in a well-edited (and usually expensive) book, and because they break the continuity of attention and thought. I'm just sayin'.
And in Cracking the Code, one needs to pay strict attention to what the author is saying. It's not your easiest book to understand, especially when you're trying, as you read, to apply the lessons to an immediate need to develop campaign position papers -- at least as I was trying to do.
PS: Useless facts department: The company name Esselte stands for S (ess) L (el) T (te), SLT, or Sveriges Litografiska Tryckeri, a gang of 13 Swedish Lithographers who combined in 1913 (13 in '13?) -- a Scandinavian outfit, as you might have guessed.
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