How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: Critical Thinking in the Age of Bias, Contested Truth, and Disinformation
Thomas C. Foster
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How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: Critical Thinking in the Age of Bias, Contested Truth, and Disinformation
Thomas C. Foster
The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media. We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We need to be more perceptive, more critical, and more judicious readers. The future of our republic may depend on it. How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is more careful, more attentive, more aware reading. On bookstore shelves, one book looks as authoritative as the next. Online, posts and memes don’t announce their relative veracity. It is up to readers to establish how accurate, how thorough, how fair material may be. After laying out general principles of reading nonfiction, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor offers advice for specific reading strategies in various genres from histories and biographies to science and technology to social media. Throughout, the emphasis will be on understanding writers’ biases, interrogating claims, analyzing arguments, remaining wary of broad assertions and easy answers, and thinking critically about the written and spoken materials readers encounter. We can become better citizens through better reading, and the time for that is now.
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0As someone who reads a fair amount of historical nonfiction and has an undergraduate degree in history, I picked this up largely to see if there were thoughts on sources or other elements that I should be more critically aware of and this book was honestly a bit hit or miss for me for that.
There was some great information on nonfiction structure like thinking about how titles and chapter organization can influence the way the information is presented. I also wasn't really familiar with the structure of more newspaper reporting so that was interesting. From my undergrad days, I'm quite familiar with checking sources and seeing what kind of biases are present but all of that is good information as well.
However, there is a ton of time spent on fake news and the tendency to believe anything that someone publishes on the internet and I get the concern and appreciate trying to tackle some of that, but it really dominates sections of the book in a way that lost my attention. I don't disagree with the points, but I didn't need them over and over again either. It felt a bit like the author's frustration with these issues meant that a lot more time was spent on them than this reader at least really needed.
Overall, if you either don't read a lot of nonfiction or want more information on ways to analyze nonfiction structure, this book is worth at least a listen to get some of the points. And if you want thoughts on ways to combat fake news or stats to point out to folks, helpful there as well. But I can't really see myself going back to reread it.
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