Ask a Bookseller: A few books for understanding how language gets weaponized

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

With the surge of ICE operations in Minnesota now in its third month, indie bookstore owners in the Twin Cities and beyond say that customers are coming in looking for three things: community, books to help them understand what's happening and books to help them escape.

Rima Parikh, owner of the science-first bookstore The Thinking Spot in Wayzata, with some of her recommendations for leaning in.

For a fiction read, Parikh says the classic novel “1984” by George Orwell has been popular. Set in a dystopian future where Big Brother is always watching, the novel describes a world where language is censored, history is changed, and the party in power tells people to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

For a historical perspective, Parikh recommends the nonfiction book “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” by historian Heather Cox Richardson.

“There are many books that try to explain the moment, but she goes way back. She goes back to the founding of America and goes through every twist and turn of our meandering history,” Parikh says. “[She] has a coherent narrative through the whole thing explaining how we got here. And essentially, her theme is that a small group of wealthy individuals have weaponized language and promoted false history, which has led us into the state of authoritarianism.”

For a book to spark conversations among children and adults alike, Parikh recommends a pair of books, “An Illustrated Guide to Bad Arguments” and “An Illustrated Guide to Loaded Language” by Ali Almossawi. These short, illustrated books introduce logical fallacies and other ways language is used to mislead others.

She offers this example in the book of a false equivalence:

“It says, yesterday's violence left 12 rabbits with lost limbs and one badger with slight shoulder pain. And the response: ‘We urge both sides to show restraint.’

“Taken as itself,” Parikh says, “urging both sides to show restraint, yes, [that’s] perfectly valid. However, in this particular context, both sides are not equivalent.”