Customer Reviews

Clear Thinking

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book for those that need to brush up on reasoning skills or as an introduction. With many full grown adults possessing little or no science and critical thinking education these days, books like these are a must-read. It is never too late to empower yourself with logic!

This is one of the only books that explicitly provides a pragmatic approach or algorithm on how to think, in step-by-step fashion. It covers most of the basic topics taught in a logic or critical reasoning course but is much simpler to follow and does not use symbolic notations.

This is an excellent and very practical book! It is much better than Flew's "How to think Straight". I highly recommend "Clear Thinking" to anyone who wants a good introduction to the practice of critical thinking.

In the introduction to "Clear Thinking", the author mentions that the reason this book was written was because an acquaintance sought a book that would introduce his gifted middle school students to logic but could not find one. This book was written to fill that niche.

"Clear Thinking" is best for its intended audience: gifted youngsters. If you are over the age of 20 and have merely a backyard familiarity with logic, pass on this book. It will not challenge you.

Consider this a review of the book as intended for smart kids. If I were to review it as intended for more mature audiences, I would give it 1.5 stars if said audience had no better than a high-school diploma.

Okay. So this is for smart kids. Is it any good? Well, it's okay. The writing is very pedestrian, and the author (though he may have noble intentions) fails to arouse the reader's mind. Logic and reasoning are VERY interesting subjects, but the rhetoric, syntax, and diction the author employs convey otherwise.

This book would have benefited from an author with a sense of humor. If you're writing for kids, try to be a little funny; this helps maintain the child's attention. Instead, the only deviation from descriptive writing (i.e., Knowledge is based on the human senses) is the occasional moralizing (i.e., Closed minds are bad).

Not to mention, this book is from 1990. The examples are a little outdated (No, seriously, this guy attacks ASTROLOGY. Does ANYone still think astrology needs to be refuted?). In addition, the texture of the pages is fairly dull and unpleasant; nonfiction books MUST have soft glossy pages nowadays.

I urge educators who want to explicitly introduce their kids to logic to look elsewhere. Scientific thinking continues to make headway into popular culture, so I'm guessing that better books have been written since.

This is by far the best book on the subject for kids in roughly a pre-adolescent age range (though of course your child's reading level may vary). Ruchlis's explanations and examples are clear, concise and well-put. My one quibble with the book is that it displays a bit of a liberal bias--the bulk of the more political examples have to do with flawed reasoning by conservatives/Republicans, few with flawed reasoning by liberals/Democrats. I wish Ruchlis had been more attentive to this issue when choosing examples (though it might make for a good teaching moment about how even authors of books like this are not immune from bias). Nonetheless it is an excellent book.

From the title and table of contents i expected a lot more. It indeed did cover all the topics of logic and faulty reasoning and avoidance of prejudice as listed but only in the most superfical ways. Not very many specific examples beyond common sense.