Footnotes

Knowing that I’m a compulsive reader, some friends and family members gave me a couple books for my birthday. I haven’t started reading either book yet, but I have given them both a cursory scan. Both books are non-fiction. One is a religion book and the other is a political opinion book. Both books are definitely in the genre of books that I like to read. Upon first glance I noticed a serious omission from one of the books that startled me. I’ve grown extremely used to the footnotes, works cited, and bibliographies in my books. They usually prompt me to consider other books as well as give me information on how to validate confirm the claims made in the book. Without these notes that would typically be expected in a political book I feel like I am either going to have to either just read the book as a political vent without any claims to being factually based, or I going to have to do more research to verify and validate the claims made in it. This book was written by one of the very talk show hosts that I stopped listening to because of his dramatic deviations from logic and reason. My first impulse is to read the book and attempt to add the footnotes that he’s missing as well as review it for logical fallacies and distortions. This may turn out to be much too daunting a task. Realistically, I will probably just read it for entertainment value and focus my efforts onto more seriously researched books. However, I’ll do my best to keep an open mind as I read it; even though the blatant lack of scholarship on this has set me off on the wrong foot.