Book info

• Title How to be Right
• Author James O'Brien
• Year 2018
• Genres Non-fiction, Politics

Every day, James O’Brien listens to people blaming hard-working immigrants for stealing their jobs while scrounging benefits, and pointing their fingers at the EU and feminists for destroying Britain. But what makes James’s daily LBC show such essential listening – and has made James a standout social media star – is the incisive way he punctures their assumptions and dismantles their arguments live on air, every single morning. In the bestselling How To Be Right, James provides a hilarious and invigorating guide to talking to people with unchallenged opinions. With chapters on every lightning-rod issue, James shows how people have been fooled into thinking the way they do, and in each case outlines the key questions to ask to reveal fallacies, inconsistencies and double standards.

Thoughts

I spend quite a lot of time avoiding the daily news because, you know, it’s awful. So I don’t know why I wanted to read this book from James O’Brien. In fact, I ended up with the second one so picked up this one to read first before moving on. It’s a very interesting read - I can’t say that I enjoyed it because it’s all very stressful and some of the people discussed within are idiots.

But it’s a great book, taking various elements of the big debates of current times and giving examples of how to probe with a variety of questions to get to the heart of the argument. And there usually isn’t much there in the heart of it, no substance. So my advice is not to read this all at ones, it gets frustrating, but definitely see it through to the finish.

Rating: 4 / 5