An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments - Ali Almossawi - ★★.½
AUTHOR: Ali Almossawi
ILLUSTRATOR: Alejandro Giraldo
GENRE: Nonfiction, Picture Book for Adults.
RATING: 2.5 stars.
In a Nutshell: Helps you understand what comprises bad arguments. Not a bad book, but my expectations were different. Digital edition available for free.
When I taught critical reasoning, one entire section of the topic was devoted to logical fallacies. Simply put, these are the flaws that people make while arguing. For instance, “I can’t understand how you hated this book. I loved it!”, or “You are an adult so why are you reading children’s books?”, or “You have no right to complain about the Jewish rep in the book if you aren’t Jewish”, or “Audiobooks aren’t read, so you cannot count them as books”, or “This novel made me lose my respect for Indian society.” (Any of these sound familiar, fellow reviewers? 😉 FWIW, the last one was actually made in a review by an ex-GR friend; she became an ex-friend immediately after I read her “review”.)
If you can see the flaws in the logic of these statements, you can certainly read this book to enhance your reasoning ability. If all the above arguments sound fair to you, I hope you aren’t in my friends list, but just in case you are, please read the book and rectify your thinking.
This book contains various logical fallacies and explains, with the proper nomenclature, the exact type of flaw, and how it results in a weak argument. One page side is devoted to the explanation, and the other side has an illustration of that particular fallacy. While I liked a few of the illustrations, I don’t think they were always effective in explaining the fallacy accurately.
As the title clearly suggests, this is a book of bad arguments. So all the knowledge herein is aimed at enhancing your understanding of bad arguments so that you can avoid their pitfalls and improve your rhetoric. After all, there are two ways of improving our skills: knowing what to do, and knowing what not to do.
I had assumed that this book would be perfect for someone like me who adores logic. I mean, I look for logic even in contemporary thrillers – such a wasteful enterprise! While I did enjoy taking a relook at the logical fallacies, I was a bit disappointed at the approach.
The biggest problem is that the explanation of the fallacies gets quite technical. To a newbie in logic, the reasoning provided might be confusing, for at least a few of the fallacies. The idea of its being an illustrated novel made me expect a more foundational approach, but that’s not to be. That said, there is a detailed glossary at the end – somewhat helpful but not enough.
The introductory note does say that the terseness of the explanations is deliberate, but maybe it ended up being too terse to be truly effective.
Another issue is that when we see that illustrated cover, we would somehow expect a light-hearted approach towards explaining this serious topic, maybe by using humour to make it easier and relatable. But the hilarity level of the book is almost zero. Even the funniest of illustrations elicited hardly any smile from me, forget about an actual chuckle.
This book is available for free on the authors’ website, so no harm in checking it out. If it works for you, great! If it does not, you haven’t lost a penny. Who knows! You might be able to deal with online trolls better armed with the skillset gained from this book. 😄
Note: Though this is an illustrated novel, this is definitely not for children as the arguments are too abstruse for their young minds.
Check it out here:
There’s a choice of seventeen translations to choose from, so pick the language you are most comfortable in.
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