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A review by holodoxa
How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between by Thomas C. Foster
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.