How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor

A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between

By: Thomas C. Foster

Narrated by: David de Vries

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.

We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We need to be more perceptive, more critical, and more judicious readers. The future of our republic may depend on it.

How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is more careful, more attentive, more aware reading. On bookstore shelves, one book looks as authoritative as the next. Online, posts and memes don’t announce their relative veracity. It is up to readers to establish how accurate, how thorough, how fair material may be.

After laying out general principles of reading nonfiction, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor offers advice for specific reading strategies in various genres from histories and biographies to science and technology to social media. Throughout, the emphasis will be on understanding writers’ biases, interrogating claims, analyzing arguments, remaining wary of broad assertions and easy answers, and thinking critically about the written and spoken materials readers encounter. We can become better citizens through better reading, and the time for that is now.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

It was pretty good

It was kind of hard to get the grasps of what the author was saying, but that could just be me and my naiveness in high level reading.

All That's Wrong with the Academy

The title should how to select material that favors your political bias. An academic should read broadly and fairly and yet, here we hear how the author favors one political perspective over another as he uses pejorative after insulting reference toward another. In his view, nothing that speaks well of the insulted perspective could ever have any worth while his favored party line can do no wrong. His inability to read without bias means that he likely constructs his arguments without considering worthy those who disagree with him. The pursuit of knowledge is not the goal of reading (and his writing), it has as its purpose the affirmation of the professor's own views.

Seems way too political for what it is

I was made to read this for an English class and did find some value in some of his teachings, but also recognize that a lot of the examples are overly political and bias.