Rating: 5/5
Review:
Intelligent and humane
I thought How To Be Right was excellent. It is readable, thoughtful,
intelligent and humane.
James O’Brien
writes very well indeed. Drawing on his experience as a print
journalist and then as a long-standing and very successful radio
phone-in host, he dissects the prejudices, myths and downright lies
which pollute our debates so badly these days. What is so striking,
though, is that he tries to believe that people are sincere but have
been misled by powerful politicians, media outlets and the like, so
he is less concerned with “winning” the argument than with trying
to get people actually to analyse and justify their positions. As he
says and illustrates well with transcripts from his shows, the
absurd, the vitriolic and the hateful rhetoric which is now so
common, almost always crumbles in the face of simple questions like
“Why do you think that?” or “Can you give me a concrete
example?” or “How is that actually affecting you?” He won’t
let go of these and explores the logical conclusions of what people
say they want to do. It’s refreshing to hear genuine rationality
and reality rather than an exchange of pre-digested, unexamined
clichés, and his analysis of where we are and its possible future
consequences is very shrewd.
This is a brief,
intellectually stimulating and enjoyable (if often slightly
depressing) read. I can heartily recommend it to anyone who values
genuine fact and rationality in a world where “alternative facts”
and echo-chamber discourse are becoming more and more dominant.
(My thanks to
Penguin/Ebury for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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