Raven and The Importance of Non-Fiction

The following blog post is going to be much more of a rant than I anticipated. I had been working on a nostalgia review while working through my current read "Ask Not" by Maureen Callahan. I had made it to about halfway through and went to update my progress on GoodReads. This led me to indulging one of my worst reading habits, checking reviews before I have finished a book. I scrolled through a few reviews finding that from what I had read I agreed with most of them. However, I came across one that struck me.

It wasn't so much that it was a one-star review in a sea of 3+. What struck me was the person's reasons for their low rating. To paraphrase, the reviewer claimed they had no way of verifying any claims. Going so far as to refer to all incidents in this book as "allegations" (never mind the fact that most of these stories are about convictions and actual court cases). The review also states that since the author openly states they took creative liberties at times (since many of these people are not still here to recount their exact emotions during these situations) the whole book cannot be trusted.

I found this line of thinking to be rather shocking. At first, I was confused about why they seemed so staunchly opposed to research or verification. Of course, the book is fighting hard against a strong propaganda machine. Yet even then most Americans in Gen X or earlier would remember some of these instances (The plane crash that killed JFK Jr., Ted Kennedy and the car crash, Joe Jr's car crash, etc.). Even if these events weren't in the living memory of this reviewer (as these are not in my living memory) these can be found by simply typing the names into Google. Yet that seems to be exactly the problem. On average most of us are not daily hunting for sources. If we find something we tend to stick with our first source, and if we do not like the source we work to discredit it.

We as humans have a bias and we carry that bias when we read. We also carry that bias when we write. When you spot and acknowledge a bias you must decide then what to do with it. In this case, If I am aware that an author is taking creative liberties. So I would try to keep that in mind when we start to discuss feelings or private conversations that were not otherwise documented (things like diaries can be a source but even those could be misused in nonfiction). If you do not like a non-fiction author taking creative liberties you need to lean more towards textbooks. Some authors do write very objectively, but again we all carry biases. I'm more thankful in this case that Callahan admits to this, rather than the endless ocean of authors who don't admit it, but still use embellishments.

Yet that was my problem. I have worked under the assumption that most people know how to engage with a nonfiction text. Working as an English teacher I spend days upon days showing my students the best ways to conduct research, formulate questions, and engage with a text. Yet I made the bad assumption that we all keep that skill once we learn it (or even that we all learned it).

The reviewer claims there is no way for her to verify claims from this book, but the reviewer is only using this book. They are not turning to outside sources, for one reason or another. The reviewer is falling under the assumption that every nonfiction book operates as a one stop shop for information on a topic. However, authors are bound to many restrictions, namely the lengths of their books and their editors/publishers. So, sometimes, basic information falls on the readers to verify for themselves. This is not inherently bad writing. Particularly if we are dealing with an author writing to a scholarly audience certain assumptions are made that may cut out some of us and require us to do catching up. Again, that does not inherently make them a bad author or the work a poor quality work.

Non-fiction authors are also bound by the time frames in which they are writing. We live in the information age in which things can update rapidly. Not every book has the chance to be republished in a new edition when that information is updated. This may feel obvious to us, but think about how often you double-check information after you've read it. There is a certain power we give to the written word, which means that when a book falls out of date and new information is revealed we sometimes react stronger to it than if an article was out of date. Again this is why, even if we don't do it often we should be backing up what we learn with other sources. It's wrong of us to dismiss information simply because we do not wish to do the extra research.

Ultimately this is not about one bad review. This isn't meant to serve as a review or defense of "Ask Not". If I had to say this is anything, it's me giving a lesson to my class on how we should be engaging with non-fiction. I ask that we acknowledge that English class wasn't about learning to like reading, it was about critical thinking. We don't have to like these books, authors, or subject matters. However, we need to be discerning when it comes to how we handle information. We should be concerned with the source of the information we receive. We should be able to spot bias and form an informed opinion based on the knowledge given and the awareness of that bias. It's okay if after reading all this you feel more assured that non-fiction is not your go-to read. All I ask is that we take a little more responsibility for how we learn and how we share information.

-Sincerely, Raven