How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor
A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between
-
-
4.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faliveno, a Sarah Lawrence creative writing instructor, explores identity in her winning debut collection. Throughout, she touches on themes of sexuality, gender, and femininity, all the while recalling her Wisconsin upbringing, with its softball, casseroles, and tornadoes. The last motif is the subject of the first essay, "The Finger of God," which revisits her youthful obsession with the meteorological phenomenon. In subsequent selections, Faliveno takes an unvarnished look at her upbringing and personal life. In "Tomboy," she gives both an etymological and personal history of the word, recalling that "growing up, I was a tomboy," while now "I don't look like a woman, and I don't always feel like one." In the same essay, Faliveno tackles "the internalized homophobia" she's "been carrying around for so long," while in "Meat and Potatoes," she recounts her experiences with openly nonmonogamous relationships and BDSM. In "Gun Country," she considers mass shootings both generally, in terms of how "anger and rage intersect with gender and violence," and personally, in terms of widespread gun ownership among her family and friends growing up. Readers who prefer to answer their questions about gender and sexuality with more questions will appreciate this perceptive meditation.
