New book combats culture of malicious misinformation

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Should we or shouldn’t we do shots of bleach? Is a doctor named Fauci telling us the facts, or is the coronavirus “just the flu?”

Thomas C. Foster’s new book, “How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor: A Smart, Irreverent Guide to Biography, History, Journalism, Blogs, and Everything in Between,” is arriving just in time to save us from the never-ending assault of information in this time of quarantine.

Everything from books to blogs to biographies are exploding in the era of 24-7 news, and Foster’s new book is the antidote to knowing what to believe and when to be skeptical about information.

Foster, just like he did in his other four best-selling books on how to bring the discipline and rigor of a college literature professor to reading, helps us understand why it is important to know writers’ biases, how to analyze complex arguments, know when a bot is buffaloing you, have a feel for attribution and even what you can learn from a prologue and index.

One take-away from the book that Foster stresses is a reader can be too cynical and skeptical.

“It’s not easy being a discerning reader these days. There is so much ‘fake news’ that we begin to believe everyone else is a liar too,” Foster said.

He writes: “Let’s suppose that the worst thing you can do when reading nonfiction is to believe everything you read is true. What’s the second worst? Not believing any of it … One possible outcome of such a revelation is cynicism; having our eye blackened once, that every outstretched hand will clench and punch us. Every book is either false or manipulative. That there is no truth to be found.”

Foster makes the subject entertaining as well as educational, mainly due to his experience standing in front of college students teaching literature and writing at the University of Michigan-Flint.

While preparing to write the book, he read scores of nonfiction books to analyze the techniques, the flaws and the strengths of great nonfiction writers.

He bluntly says, “This isn’t the book I set out to write. That would’ve been boring.”

He said the recent eruption of political books required him to write “On the Stump,” a chapter on how to read political writing with a wary eye. Foster cites two examples of political nonfiction books providing the greatest contrast.

First is Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” an exposition of President Trump’s presidency told with explicit fact-checking and substantive direct quotes from sources. As a contrast, he uses Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” which is devoid of both.

With a nod to history, he uses the many books written about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn to illustrate his point.

“There are many books written about him that are practically worshipful. In reality, he was not a good guy,” Foster said.

Foster also spends time in the book about “Eyewitness Testimony” and analyzes the New Journalism style of writing of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, which proliferated in the mid-’60s while he was still in college.

He writes: “It doesn’t change even if the telling is experimental and out-of-kilter. The ‘new’ part had only to do with the manner of the telling, such as using techniques from fiction.”

The stream of consciousness technique is “an attempt to capture the thoughts of the character in the language the character would use if she had enough access to her deep consciousness to be able to articulate those thoughts,” according to Foster.

In his book, Foster lays out exactly what is an opinion piece, what is news, what is satire and how to tell the differences.

“It’s a problem a lot of readers have — individuals don’t understand what they are reading,” he said.

He also points out that if you are reading online you should be aware if you are hearing from a brand-new source. “You want to check it out. There is no way to be inoculated against it,” he said.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found made-up news is believed to be a bigger problem than other key issues such as violent crime and racism. The study also found that Americans believe made-up news, which causes “significant harm to the nation” and “needs to be stopped.”

Some 78 percent of those polled say made-up news and information “greatly impacts American’s confidence in government institutions.”

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