85 books like The Art of Being Right

This book was one of the first to take critical thinking beyond a purely academic focus on informal logic, so that it deals with ‘real-world’ material (even including cartoon strips).

As the author explains, he was concerned that, though his students could learn from informal logic books how to identify and label errors in reasoning, they were unable to transfer this understanding to their own writing and to everyday material.

There are many useful exercises after each chapter, enabling the reader to apply their understanding of the content. The author hopes that the book is both rigorous and accessible, and this hope is indeed vindicated.

This book appealed to me when I first read it many years ago because of the way in which it explains the skills of critical thinking in a very approachable and interesting way.

It does this by using simple and everyday examples such that the reader develops the skills through applying the theoretical aspects of critical thinking to them. In addition, there are plenty of ‘self-tests’ for the reader to check and reinforce their learning.

It is clear that the author’s experience with teaching students gives him a good understanding of how critical thinking should be approached.

This book takes a different approach to the more general accounts of critical thinking, by focusing on how it helps us to appreciate literature.

The author does this by showing how using critical thinking can deepen our understanding of literature, including drama (Shakespeare, Beckett), poetry (such as Donne, Larkin, Marvell, Owen, and Wordsworth), and first-person narratives.

The book sparkles with wonderful applications of critical thinking, enabling us to appreciate texts such that we see them in a new way, with all sorts of insights being suggested and developed. Her plea that we should also look at screenplays by using a critical thinking perspective is very convincing.

Read this book and your reading of literature will be significantly enriched. 

This book provides a very important background to how critical thinking needs to be seen in terms of how it fits with the ancient skills of rhetoric.

The author demonstrates how the skills of argumentation (central to critical thinking) were central to how classical scholars (including Aristotle, Protagoras, Quintilian, and Cicero) saw the huge value in being skilled in rhetoric. For example, the maxim of Protagoras that there are two sides to every question is given (with a worry for us -is there?).

The celebrated discussion between God and Moses in the Midrash is a wonderful example of how one’s position with regard to power and authority cannot trump the quality of an argument (such that Moses wins the day). This is a lively and thrilling ride in critical thinking.

Most people are led through life by their feelings. Feelings are fine, they enrich our lives, but as the sole guide for making decisions, they fall short. Ruggiero, a huge name in critical thinking, starts from this point, the point of being led by our feelings. And that alone makes this a very good guide to critical thinking.

The author of this short and easy-to-read chapter book goes beyond the story. I recommend this book because I like the last page of the book title “Notes for Adults.”

In busy life, it is easy to let our children read by themselves. It is easy to forget that books contain valuable lessons. It is easy to miss the opportunity to challenge reading skills and make the children read between the line to develop their critical thinking skills.

In this book, the author proposes before, during and after reading activities to support literacy skill. Wow! If you do all of them, this book is worth the money you have paid for it.

All parents and teachers should aim to develop children’s critical thinking.

The story itself evokes memories of dreams and nightmares, but Arthur Rackham’s drawings made me want to draw and tell stories through images.

I knew the curious story of Alice before seeing Rackham’s illustrations and loved the predicaments, characters and how random everything was. His drawings completed the story, and I saw the pair as a perfect match; they were rich and on point with how my imagination wanted them to be.

This book struck a visual chord and changed the way I looked at picture books. As most of my favorites were in full or limited color, Jumanji’s black and white illustrations had extreme perspective and were visually exciting.

This book inspired me to push both my illustration and text for picture books toward a less juvenile or simple presentation. The illustrations in Jumanji are a departure from the ordinary in both subject and artistic approach. It urged me to look harder at the extraordinary in the ordinary.

In my view, the capstone work of a preeminent scholar of law and the humanities. Explores the ways in which language—specifically, but not exclusively, of lawyers—works in one of two ways. It either is shaped by, and in turn shapes, authoritarian, reflexive, cliched, unthinking, and ultimately inhumane ways of life. Or, alternatively, it promotes thoughtful dialogue, respect for the reader or listener, critical thinking, and humane values. The former pattern of speech is deadening and itself dead; the latter is enlivening and alive. This insight, from a lifetime of thinking about language, gives White his title, Living Speech. The book reflects such a humane, educated, and generous mind, and is so fresh in some of its arguments, that I can say this without overstatement: it is one of very few books that has changed the way I look at my work and, more importantly, at any polity or community.

I like a challenge, so I was drawn to how this concept picture book tackles a challenging topic, making it fun and accessible. While colorful robots dance and bicker, the text asks readers to evaluate statements to determine if they’re facts or opinions. Readers learn to question information and to respect the opinions of others, skills many adults haven’t mastered. The best thing about this book is that it fosters critical thinking.