Non-Fiction That Will Change The Way You Think
[Three Book Thursday #2]
If you would like any specific recommendations for next week, leave a comment on this post or drop me a message on Instagram.
As usual, affiliate links are below.
Factfullness // Hans Rosling
What percentage of people around the world live in poverty? What percentage of girls finish school? I’m sure everyone will agree that knowing the answers to such questions is fundamental to finding solutions to the problems that lie behind them. Well, at the heart of this book is a damning claim that ordinary people, industry experts, and the people charged with shaping public consistently get the answers to these questions wrong.
Rosling disagrees with the binary characterisation of countries as either developed or developing, proposing that this simplistic assessment limits how accurately we can assess the world. He attempts to prove this by illustrating how little we know about the world we live in, divided neatly into ten common judgments and misconceptions about global trends.
Rather than a binary rich/poor classification, Rosling presents the alternative theory of four income levels and describes the lives of individuals across this spectrum using examples from various aspects of ordinary life, such as transport, food, clothing, and sleeping space. The mode of transportation, for example, for people from income levels one through four, would be walking, cycling, motorbike, and car. The intention is to show how people flow up the scale rather than down it.
Promoting the status quo (which some claim this book is doing) can certainly be problematic. However, I’m not making this recommendation because it’s perfect; it’s because it’ll make you think. It only takes a brief consideration of your friends and family to find examples of people climbing the scale from one income level to another and changing their family’s lives forever.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed // Jon Ronson
Jon Ronson is always easy to recommend, as is his most famous book, The Psychopath Test…so I will recommend something else instead.
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was probably published prematurely, several years before the peak of so-called “cancel culture”. In this fascinating book, Ronson unpicks the process of public shaming and the psyche of the people instigating it, showing how something so small can quickly spiral into a life-changing moment with damaging effects on its targets.
In some ways it reminded me of Derren Brown’s gameshow from about a decade ago, where he emphasised the power of anonymity and mob mentality to his live audience and us at home. Just as the show did, this book will make you think about your own presence online and the purpose behind your actions.
You will probably see cases you’ve heard of, the most famous is perhaps the story of the woman behind the tweet “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”. You will also definitely read about cases you’ve never heard of, but all of it is presented with a level of analysis that you’re unlikely to get elsewhere. The book is full of brilliant research and plenty of primary source information in classic Ronson style; it is unique, inviting, and addictive.
Men Who Hate Women // Laura Bates
Having established beyond doubt in Everyday Sexism and Misogynation that sexism exists and is a huge systemic issue in western society, Laura uses this book as an opportunity to delve deeper into the debate and attempts to uncover the ever-growing, insidious, underground political movement that is at the forefront of propelling viral sexism into the mainstream; now a political movement with its own ideology, hierarchy, and manifesto.
From online incel groups to the terror attacks their members commit, to the doxing and swatting of their opposition, to the pick-up artists perpetrating a variation of the same misogyny. These groups may have their “headquarters” in a niche corner of the Internet, but their operations are increasingly carried out in the mainstream - they are not a bunch of creeps distinctly different from the average person; they ARE the average person in every other meaningful way which allows them to hide in plain sight.
As far as I know, Bates is the first to highlight this link and define misogyny as a political identity, and since this book was published there have been several attacks on women, which sadly prove Bates’ theory.