Books that are equal parts wrath and fact. So I like books that are hectoring and well-researched.
Opinions are serious things, and we all see the world our particular way. I like books with backbone: Books that don’t shy away from controversy or claim all ideas are equally valid, because they’re not, or that we’re all basically the same, because we’re not. I like books that try to change the world, one reader at a time. I don’t seem to have inherited that yen for contentiousness, but nor does it trouble me overmuch the earliest lullaby cooed in the midst of my infant ears surely was a surly, “Oh, yeah? Well, lemme tell you what I think about that.”Ĭonsequently I come to polemical books with an anticipatory zeal engendered by a lifetime of listening to arguments. My childhood memories include the spectacle of various red-faced relatives as they wrangled over politics, sports, cars, music, war, free will versus predestination - and those were just for starters. They want to keep an argument going as long as possible, like kids on a beach vacation trying to keep a plastic ball aloft forever with a series of strategic taps. The goal is to oppose, to counter, to rile up, to square off, to nitpick, to irk, to goad. Scratch that: Make it especially if they don’t know to what you’re referring.
My kinfolk are the kind of people who, if you say, “White,” will automatically say, “Black,” even if they don’t know to what you are referring. Recreational arguers, you might call them.
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