I have often recommended Juhana Torkki’s speaking skill guides in my courses, so I eagerly picked up The Power of the Story, which came out this year. Even though the topic interests me and my opinion of his work was positive, rarely have I read anything so tedious. The book felt onerous because of its verbose style and its overload of metaphors (no more campfires, tribes, or cavemen, please). His overlong examples of storytellers seemed trite (Jobs), pretentious (Obama) and smarmy (Saarinen). A general lifestyle-guide tone tends to drag down even the good sections such as a recap of Barthes‘ narrative components: nuclei form a plot, catalysts describe, indexes deepen human characters, informants create the illusion of reality. One interesting discovery was the propaganda theorist Georg Klaus, who reversed the relation of jargon and comprehensible talk: just by simplifying, you are able to fool the audience. I’ll sum up my review by citing Johnson: “The book is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.” The same could apply, of course, to this review.