3 out of 4 stars
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Bring Home the Bacon is a book about delivering presentations more effectively and honing your overall speaking skills. It's written by Larry Tracy, a man with decades of experience speaking to audiences that are often less than receptive. He retired to become a speech coach, and this book is the culmination of all of his knowledge. It deals with subjects from overcoming fear of public speaking to various preparation strategies, all in a brisk 131 pages.
This book's greatest strength, of course, is the author's expertise. He shares relevant and interesting anecdotes, such as the time he spoke in favor of foreign policy choices in front of students who were extremely critical of the government, to justify his teachings and keep reader interest. This made the book truly feel like a veteran speaker was sharing his understanding of presentations with the reader - there aren't any worksheets to fill out at the end of each chapter, so it has none of the tedium of other instructional books that try ineffectually to mimic textbooks.
Bring Home the Bacon is also very well-organized. The author advocates the S3P3 method, and he mostly focuses on the three P's: planning, practicing, and presenting. After an introductory portion that provides an overview of the entire method, there's one part for each P, broken into logical sub-categories. This was extremely helpful, as it allowed me to group different concepts about public speaking while I was reading without being so formulaic that it felt boring or dry. Tracy's tone also helps with this. He's to-the-point, but his writing still feels conversational and engaging.
Unfortunately, as with many books of this nature, there were some fairly significant editing problems. These included misplaced quotation marks, missing spaces, and the occasional misspelled word. It's truly a shame that these were so prevalent since I found the book so informative, but unfortunately, I can't overlook them as they were quite distracting at times.
Because of these editing problems, I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. I highly recommend it to people looking to improve their public speaking skills, especially anyone who has to do a lot of public speaking as a result of their job or who presents in the realm of business. Reading the book alone won't automatically make you a better speaker, but its insights are valuable and communicated very effectively, meaning putting them into practice will significantly boost your presentations.
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Bring Home the Bacon
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