An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments

By: Ali Almossawi

Narrated by: James Gillies

This book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning, particularly those who, to borrow a phrase from Pascal, are so made that they understand best through visuals. I have selected a small set of common errors in reasoning and visualized them using memorable illustrations that are supplemented with lots of examples. The hope is that the reader will learn from these pages some of the most common pitfalls in arguments and be able to identify and avoid them in practice. For the audiobook version, the illustrations have been replaced with short sketches, voiced in a variety of accents.

©2013 Ali Almossawi (P)2013 Ali Almossawi

interesting and entertaining, but unhelpful

I loved the reader's voice; that alone made this worth the money for me, but your mileage may vary. The fallacies are each defined, then illustrated by a brief example, then illustrated again by a creative and entertaining attempt to render the book's visuals in audio format. From what I remember of my logic class, the definitions are accurate and they are easy to understand, and the visuals come across well enough in the audio descriptions. where the book falls down, in my opinion, is that the brief examples AND the visuals often bare little relation to the definition of the fallacy they are supposed to be illuminating; thus, they are little more than entertaining distractions. If you are looking for a bit of fun, this book is enjoyable, but I don't think it will help you learn much.

this is not your usual audible book.

first of all it is under an hour long second it is each of the lines represents an individual chapter. They are best thought of as aphorisms related to the useful understanding of the logic of rhetoric and argument. The way it's done is that the book itself is made of illustrations presumably with these single line aphorisms one per page or 1 per caption but the narrator of the audible book uses funny voices to try to get the message across by describing the illustration actually it's fun and pretty effective. However fortunately the book is only an hour long because I know I'm going to have to go back and listen to it more than once. Then again since it is somewhat didactic, I would have to go back and reread it or review it several times anyway. One other feature which given that I've been a student all my life and have Decades of Scholastic experience under my belt, the list of definitions and premises the end of the book was very helpful for me to understand elements of formal logical philosophy semicolon the only thing is that I'm going to have to review those definitions again more than once too. The single most important item that I learned listening to this hour today is the difference between deductive logic and inductive logic. I think I got that one specifically. What a relief after only 60 years.

Maybe a Better Book in Print

This book was okay, but being clearly designed as a print book, it does not correlate well as an audio book.