My Review of "How to Think"

Alan Jacobs' How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds is the right book for the right time. Jacobs is a good thinker, as any with knowledge of his previous books, many essays, and invaluable blog posts will know. How to Think is vintage Jacobs -- an incisive, consistently thoughtful work that hits a post-truth, "alternative facts", right-side-of-history American culture right between the eyes. The worst thing that can be said of it is that it doesn't say quite enough.

Fortunately, How to Think is not directed at any one political polemic or a guidebook for navigating Facebook or Twitter. Jacobs writes that it's a mistake to assume that human beings are ultimately rational beings whose irrationality cannot be understood. On the contrary, human nature, and therefore human thinking, is inescapably moral. We often think and live poorly because we want to. How to Think says we fail to think correctly, fairly, and helpfully because doing so may interfere with what we want.

How to Think is a valuable work that combines an intelligent awareness of the crisis with literary and deeply humane suggestions for addressing it. My advice? Read this book in silence. Consume it in periods of quiet contemplation. Don't snack on it in between refreshes of the Twitter feed or during a break in your online debating. Steal away to a good library or a quiet field, pen in hand, and learn how to think.

I received a free copy of this game from the Blogging for Books review program in exchange for my honest review here.

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