Euan Lawson
Left and right: Click bait book titles
There is not much doubt that click bait book titles are in vogue. They tend to be provocative, Buzzfeed inspired, and just like standard click bait they don’t necessarily reflect the content of the actual book. My most recommended book this month is James O’Brien’s How to Be Right… in a world gone wrong.° O’Brien is a radio chat show host on LBC° and he’s very left wing. Unusual in the world of ‘shock jocks’. His book is brilliant at walking through the arguments people use to ram home their points around race, migration, Islamophobia, feminism and, of course, Brexit. He carefully and comprehensively demolishes them and shows us how to do it too. His techniques will, naturally, work for any political position and he is incredibly ineffective at pushing people further to justify their position. In all the examples in the book they quickly fall apart. It is compelling.
He uses transcripts (or recollections of them) in the book and it works brilliantly in audiobook form. I have a slight fear of authors reading their own work. Audiobook narration is not easy and butchering it can destroy the experience. This is one where I’m happy to report the opposite. I can’t imagine this book working without O’Brien’s voice as he narrates his work and recreates the debates with the angry callers. I’m still not that keen on the title. It isn’t really about being right in the sense of besting someone. It could be argued it is about being ‘right’ in the sense of ensuring one’s arguments are robust, coherent and consistent with one’s experience and the evidence available. O’Brien excels in deconstructing opinions that can’t meet these criteria. (It is possible my enjoyment of this book is a form of bias as well - O’Brien’s views are a very close fit with my own.) I’ll be listening again in the near future.