A timely and valuable primer on how to assess sources.
A guide focuses on detecting bias in social media posts and news stories.
Dedicating this book to “a more productive, civil discourse,” Bean provides readers with essential tools to assess the validity and bias of social media offerings and news reports. With a doctorate in education, the author is well equipped to teach readers the critical thinking skills required to navigate the labyrinth of social media and fake news and does so in an approachable, easy-to-read format. In under 60 pages, this concise manual teaches readers how to identify bias, differentiate between types of publications, and “test journalistic sources.” As Tim Vos, director of Michigan State University’s School of Journalism, notes in the guide’s foreword, “Biases…are baked into the information we encounter nearly every moment of every day.” The book also contextualizes dangerous trends that discerning readers should be familiar with, such as the role of social media algorithms in promoting disinformation and the disturbing fact that six corporations control 90% of all media outlets in America. The manual’s final chapters introduce readers to common logical fallacies, such as false dichotomies and straw-man arguments, and deliver best practices for maintaining a personal social media account. The author advises readers to avoid sharing information online without utilizing the book’s “reliability tests.” Designed to be a reference tool that readers peruse periodically, the manual eschews long narrative discursions for succinct lists and easy-to-remember acronyms. Also found in the guide is a nine-question “Bias Assessment Form” that readers can use to rate the objectivity of virtually any source they encounter. Accompanied by the colorful, engaging paper artwork of Gorske, this is an important book, ideal for dissemination in libraries, high schools, and other venues with vested interests in promoting information literacy. While targeting the victims of disinformation campaigns in its mission to empower readers who are vulnerable to fake news, the manual unfortunately supplies limited answers on how to deal with those who know better yet still promote falsehoods for their own ideological or financial benefit.
A timely and valuable primer on how to assess sources.Pub Date: July 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73447-446-6
Page Count: 57
Publisher: Ethan Bean Mental Wellness Foundation
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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