Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behavior

This is a book about actions, about how actions become gestures and about how gestures transmit messages. Psychologists have long studied what makes people tick. Now Desmond Morris reveals that makes people twitch, stare, grimace, point, poke and shrug. Here is a complete and fascinating catalog of human behavior, closely examined in Morris lively text and hundreds of telling photographs, drawings, and historical prints. In this captivating anthology of body language are the postures, hand gestures, and facial expressions that accompany our true feelings, often hidden under the mask of convention. Here is how we pantomime the meaning beneath our outward behavior in the whole range of social situations. This is the new science of 'Manwatching,' a study that has occupied Desmond Morris for a decade.

Traveling widely, he has collected countless observations of ways people act.. in public and private, in all social contexts, among all ages and both sexes. And more than merely observing, he has categorized this revealing panorama of feeling and desire. But just as the birdwatcher does not study birds in order to shoot them, the Manwatcher seeks to understand, to read the secrets of our unspoken languages. This is the value and delight of the book... a set of keys to human understanding and appreciation that will enlighten and enrich daily life.

Illustrated with 470 photographs, 290 in color, and some 250 drawings, prints and diagrams.