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holodoxa's review against another edition
2.0
I am a fan of Thomas C. Foster's How to Read... Like a Professor and especially his 25 Books that Shaped America even when they were guilty of simplification or superficial analysis, but those prior weakness were amplified in this book. This would be fine given that this work is probably targeted at high school and early college students, but there are just superior options, such as Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. There are also works that are more technical and for pedagogical purposes like Everything's an Argument by John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters, which provide greater detail about how effective claims are structured and how reliability of sources and the evidentiary value of claims can be rigorously evaluated.
Foster also tries to trade on topicality in this work focusing heavily on rhetoric from and books on the Trump administration. He of course expresses concerns about the merchants of doubt and their flood the zone strategy, which he calls particularly nihilistic. I think greater emphasis on historical examples of political rhetoric from long settled issues would have been better selections. Even the use of Woodward & Bernstein's Watergate journalism is butting up against the modern era too much. I think a modern era section would be fine in a work like this, but it would need a lot more caveats and deeper discussions about political rhetoric and ideology. Foster's position as authoritative on these issues is unwarranted. This is given away by the fairly narrow range of contemporary and erudite political columnists whose work he selects (mostly a particular iteration of NYT Op-Ed writers like David Brooks and Maureen Dowd).
Despite the many issues with the work (I have failed to catalog all my points of criticism here), I did enjoy some of Foster's passing critical commentary on those loosely group in the New Journalism school: Capote, Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, etc. I think he undersold Wolfe a bit though. Moreover, there are helpful aspects of the work that many readers can benefit from, especially if they are less experienced in reading works of non-fiction.
Foster also tries to trade on topicality in this work focusing heavily on rhetoric from and books on the Trump administration. He of course expresses concerns about the merchants of doubt and their flood the zone strategy, which he calls particularly nihilistic. I think greater emphasis on historical examples of political rhetoric from long settled issues would have been better selections. Even the use of Woodward & Bernstein's Watergate journalism is butting up against the modern era too much. I think a modern era section would be fine in a work like this, but it would need a lot more caveats and deeper discussions about political rhetoric and ideology. Foster's position as authoritative on these issues is unwarranted. This is given away by the fairly narrow range of contemporary and erudite political columnists whose work he selects (mostly a particular iteration of NYT Op-Ed writers like David Brooks and Maureen Dowd).
Despite the many issues with the work (I have failed to catalog all my points of criticism here), I did enjoy some of Foster's passing critical commentary on those loosely group in the New Journalism school: Capote, Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, etc. I think he undersold Wolfe a bit though. Moreover, there are helpful aspects of the work that many readers can benefit from, especially if they are less experienced in reading works of non-fiction.
anniegroover's review against another edition
4.0
I don't know if the title is quite apt, I think it's more "how to read and understand nonfiction well" but that's not as snappy. Nothing too earth-shattering, but entertaining and a good source for some books I haven't read yet.
bookaddictang's review against another edition
4.0
Not going to lie, I have "How to Read Fiction Like a Professor" but have never read it. Pretty sure it's been on my TBR for 10+ years at this point (eek!). It's one of those books I've been meaning to get to. But when this book popped up on Instagram I bought it immediately. Since I started grad school this fall I thought it would be a good book to help me re-acclimate to academia, and it did but it also helped me re-evaluate how I read nonfiction in my every day life as well.
Foster provides a really great breakdown using multiple writing samples for how to think critically of the information you are reading. He also breaks down how different nonfiction pieces are written and classified, and how that shapes the information we are reading.
If you find yourself consuming a lot of news, and you're struggling to make heads or tales if what you're reading is real or "fake" this book is worth reading. I found it to be easy to digest, and as shown in my reading timeline, it's very easy to pick up and put down as needed.
Foster provides a really great breakdown using multiple writing samples for how to think critically of the information you are reading. He also breaks down how different nonfiction pieces are written and classified, and how that shapes the information we are reading.
If you find yourself consuming a lot of news, and you're struggling to make heads or tales if what you're reading is real or "fake" this book is worth reading. I found it to be easy to digest, and as shown in my reading timeline, it's very easy to pick up and put down as needed.
doel7's review against another edition
1.0
Where do I begin with this book? The first issue is of false advertising. If you're going to market your book as a "How to read" book, at some point you should probably teach people, you know, how to read different forms of nonfiction, preferably somewhere in the beginning. There is very little of that in the book. The main meat of the book, which goes through different forms of nonfiction writing simply describes the books and doesn't really teach you how to read them. I had to get to page 230 to get anything really useful (interrogating the books) which really should have been the first chapter.
The second problem is the overtly and weirdly placed political content, which I don't mind generally but the author should have just written a book about Trump and how horrible he is because he spends a good third of the book doing just that. The entire chapter on political writing, which is about 30 pages, is devoted to Trump. He mashes all this in with his equal hatred of Russia and their "interference" in the American election, taking the line that nothing was wrong in the US, and that Clinton was some sort of shoe in candidate with no horrible baggage (Iraq War, Libya, corruption, super predators) and if it hadn't been for Russia, she would be sitting in the Oval Office. This of course completely ignores the major issues currently racking the United States (expensive foreign wars, corporate takeover of every level of government, expanding gap between rich and poor, the opioid epidemic, environmental crises, etc), that it is an empire in decline and the fact that most people find Clinton to be repulsive and insincere. He really shows his age when he blames the internet for creating the spread of misinformation (p. 68). Ok boomer. It's your generation that got us Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton and Bush that led the world into a neoliberal dystopia that we are currently living in. Also there was plenty of disinformation campaigns before the internet, many of which were perpetrated by your intelligence communities which he seems to trust so much. The most hilarious part of this Russian interference, if it did indeed take place and had the effect of changing the results of an election, is that maybe the Americans are getting a little taste of their own medicine. Pretty hard to complain about something that you have done to literally every other country on the planet, including Russia. I would recommend that the author read Killing Hope by William Blum to see the path of despair and destruction that their country has brought to the earth since its rise to a superpower after the Second World War.
The other issue the author has is with sources of information. One line blew me away. He states on page 155 that "for all the abuse that mainstream media take from those on the loonier fringes, our major news sources are pretty trustworthy." The statement is simply laughable. He then goes on to state in his next point is that we should look at the source of the information and whether it is reliable and cites the tobacco industry and that we shouldn't be taking medical advice from them. This completely undercuts his previous point because all mainstream media in the United States is funded by Big Insurance, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex and Wall Street. His strange obsession with "experts" ignores the fact that during the leadup to the Iraq War all the experts were brought on the mainstream media and parroted the lies of the Bush administration and led the United States into a disastrous war. The experts also told us that there would be no crash in 2008 and that the housing market was rock solid. The author completely ignores the fact that experts can lie and that they can be paid off and pressured into doing what the powerful want.
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Am I a "how to" book or a political commentary? Should I talk about how to read nonfiction, or should I yammer on about how Trump is so bad and that the internet ruined everything? Want a good book on how to read? Read "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and file this book in the disjointed, strange, falsely advertised section of your library.
The second problem is the overtly and weirdly placed political content, which I don't mind generally but the author should have just written a book about Trump and how horrible he is because he spends a good third of the book doing just that. The entire chapter on political writing, which is about 30 pages, is devoted to Trump. He mashes all this in with his equal hatred of Russia and their "interference" in the American election, taking the line that nothing was wrong in the US, and that Clinton was some sort of shoe in candidate with no horrible baggage (Iraq War, Libya, corruption, super predators) and if it hadn't been for Russia, she would be sitting in the Oval Office. This of course completely ignores the major issues currently racking the United States (expensive foreign wars, corporate takeover of every level of government, expanding gap between rich and poor, the opioid epidemic, environmental crises, etc), that it is an empire in decline and the fact that most people find Clinton to be repulsive and insincere. He really shows his age when he blames the internet for creating the spread of misinformation (p. 68). Ok boomer. It's your generation that got us Thatcher, Blair, Reagan, Clinton and Bush that led the world into a neoliberal dystopia that we are currently living in. Also there was plenty of disinformation campaigns before the internet, many of which were perpetrated by your intelligence communities which he seems to trust so much. The most hilarious part of this Russian interference, if it did indeed take place and had the effect of changing the results of an election, is that maybe the Americans are getting a little taste of their own medicine. Pretty hard to complain about something that you have done to literally every other country on the planet, including Russia. I would recommend that the author read Killing Hope by William Blum to see the path of despair and destruction that their country has brought to the earth since its rise to a superpower after the Second World War.
The other issue the author has is with sources of information. One line blew me away. He states on page 155 that "for all the abuse that mainstream media take from those on the loonier fringes, our major news sources are pretty trustworthy." The statement is simply laughable. He then goes on to state in his next point is that we should look at the source of the information and whether it is reliable and cites the tobacco industry and that we shouldn't be taking medical advice from them. This completely undercuts his previous point because all mainstream media in the United States is funded by Big Insurance, Big Pharma, the military industrial complex and Wall Street. His strange obsession with "experts" ignores the fact that during the leadup to the Iraq War all the experts were brought on the mainstream media and parroted the lies of the Bush administration and led the United States into a disastrous war. The experts also told us that there would be no crash in 2008 and that the housing market was rock solid. The author completely ignores the fact that experts can lie and that they can be paid off and pressured into doing what the powerful want.
This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Am I a "how to" book or a political commentary? Should I talk about how to read nonfiction, or should I yammer on about how Trump is so bad and that the internet ruined everything? Want a good book on how to read? Read "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and file this book in the disjointed, strange, falsely advertised section of your library.
y3llowsubmarin3's review against another edition
1.0
Having to read this ass book for ap lang was the bane of my existence
cozylifewithabby's review against another edition
I read to page 70 and then skimmed for topics. This book felt disorganized and basic. Not the tremendous resource that How to Read Literature Like a Professor Was
leezavh's review against another edition
1.0
Packed full of useless, repetitive information. This could have been condensed down to like 100 pages and it would have been just as informative. It's mostly just the author explaining the plot of various nonfiction books and then telling us his opinions on it. Very boring. So thanks for that Thomas