A detailed, cleareyed approach to assessing information.
A sweeping new assessment of how we know things—and how we can know them better.
“The vast differences between the actual functions of the universe and our commonsense experience of it,” writes De Filippis at the beginning of his nonfiction work, “should cause us to question the very foundations of our worldview.” He wishes more people engaged in such questioning; in the age of information silos and bias bubbles, the author sees the essentials of critical thinking as more endangered than ever. In these pages, he seeks to provide a heuristic program designed to help readers improve their own critical reasoning skills. To do this, he breaks down the ways we know things and the ways we select and analyze facts. The author takes a deep dive into the matrices of how people function on a cognitive level, examining five qualities: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. He considers how those qualities govern the ways people make assertions, declarations, etc.—noting, for instance, that people on the “high end” of agreeableness might be so willing to accommodate others that they accept biases and misinformation without objection. De Filippis was born and raised in small-town rural America, and he interweaves many aspects of his own story into his breakdowns of more abstruse ideas, which helps to ground them. Much of what he details comes down to context, he says: “Context determines the language game being played, and tangling that game happens when that context is purposely or accidentally confused or distorted.” Untangling these language games is at the heart of the systems De Filippis outlines here, and his lively prose makes even his most complex material approachable as he guides readers toward fewer knee-jerk reactions.
A detailed, cleareyed approach to assessing information.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-718987-7
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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