Book – How To Be Right In A World Gone Wrong
Author – James O’Brien
Year – 2018
Pages – 232
Genre – Non-Fiction
Oh the teasing I got for reading a book called How To Be Right.
I think James O’Brien is brilliant. He wasn’t really on my radar until relatively recently when clips from his LBC radio show of him calmly and expertly dealing with irrational callers started to go viral with incredible regularity. After one or two of those however, I really began to admire him. I am unashamedly left in my views. I am genuinely always open to debate them and change them if needs be, but I spend a lot of time thinking about my political positioning, and it would take a lot to change my mind on something based simply on a person’s argument. Hence the teasing for this book. However, I don’t always get these views across to other people as neatly as I would like to. James O’Brien however is excellent at this. He puts things in a clear and clever way that I think does not ever come across as being patronising. I know that some people hugely disagree with me on this, but I am being magnanimous having read this book, so I shan’t argue.
In How To Be Right, O’Brien takes several important subjects of the moment – Brexit, Trump, Feminism – and deconstructs how he can approach them with members of the public, and the best ways in which we can do so as well. He is clever, funny, and often self-deprecating, and it makes it incredibly easy to go along with this book as a result, but furthermore, I think he is quite simply right. I know that there is a lot written about the echo chamber, and how our views are so often repeated back to us, simply because these are the things that we are most likely to read, but you know sometimes that is worth it. When it is as eloquently and expertly put as this, then this is certainly one of them.
I loved this book. If you share my beliefs then you probably will too. However, if you don’t then I genuinely believe that you might still get something out of it as well. This is one of the best books I have read in a while and I would recommend checking it out.
10/10