by Daniel J. Levitin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016
Valuable tools for anyone willing to evaluate claims and get to the truth of the matter.
A crash course in Skepticism 101.
“Much of what we read should raise our suspicions,” warns Levitin (Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience/McGill Univ.; The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, 2014, etc.). Indeed, lies abound, and “bad statistics are everywhere.” Averages can be manipulated. Graphs can distort. Misinformation proliferates in books, websites, videos, and social media. What to do? Levitin says we must engage in critical thinking, and he spells out in this lucid text exactly what that means when encountering words and numbers and trying to decide what’s true and what’s not. Using vivid examples from major media, the author shows how easily—whether accidentally or deliberately—data can lead us astray. For one thing, statistics are gathered by fallible people. Have terms been properly defined? Has a representative sample been taken? Have credible experts been cited? Are the sources reputable (peer-reviewed articles, books from major publishers)? Be suspicious of all information. “You shouldn’t trust everything you read in the New York Times,” he writes, “or reject everything you read on TMZ.” The Times, after all, runs daily corrections. With common sense as a first line of defense (if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is), readers must be mindful of the scientific method, a major focus of the book. Where’s the evidence? Where’s the control group? What are the possible alternative explanations? Levitin takes pains to emphasize that once misinformation takes hold, many people can believe things that aren’t so. He details four pitfalls in critical thinking that have led many to blame vaccinations for the rise in autism rates. He also cautions against routinely accepting the information on websites, which can be biased or badly outdated. Often, he says, we become our own enemies. We blindly accept numbers that intimidate or insist on neat stories when not everything is explainable.
Valuable tools for anyone willing to evaluate claims and get to the truth of the matter.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95522-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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by Maya Angelou and illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher
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