Conversation : a history of a declining art / Stephen Miller.

Conversation and its discontents
Ancient conversation : from the Book of Job to Plato's Symposium
Three factors affecting conversation : religion, commerce, women
The age of conservation : Eighteenth-century Britain
Samuel Johnson : a conversational triumph; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu : conversation lost
Conversation in decline : from raillery to reverie
Conversation in America : from Benjamin Franklin to Dale Carnegie
Modern enemies of conversation : from countercultural theorists to "white Negroes"
The ways we don't converse now
The end of conversation?