
How to Think
A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $13.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
P. J. Ochlan
-
By:
-
Alan Jacobs
How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life.
As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.
Most of us don't want to think, Jacobs writes. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias.
In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking - forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, "alternative facts", and information overload - and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It's impossible to "think for yourself".)
Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C. S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.
©2017 Alan Jacobs (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
People who viewed this also viewed...






Required Reading for Humans
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Fantastic perspective
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A bit heady, but it's still a good listen
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Somehow expected a far longer book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very intellectual.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The advice in the book is good, but nothing revolutionary. It did not change my life in any way, but reinforced some ideas I have already incorporated. For people who want a more open mind, this could be revolutionary.
I won't say I will not recommend this book to anyone, but it would be a selected individual, and I would encourage the print over the audio version.
Droning Good Advice
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Short but Gold
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Essential Social Advise
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Depends
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thoughtful, hopeful, useful and fair.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.