Ratings3
Average rating4.3
This is a hard review to write. I found this book to be excellent, and I think I probably need to re-read it at least once more and potentially another couple of times to get the full benefit.
Basically, in this book, Alan Jacobs talks extensively about the way we, as individuals, need to rethink our interactions with people “from the other side.” I believe this would be beneficial for people on either side of the political spectrum, and especially for those people who have an interest in interacting with the other side for any reason. As I'm sure you know, in today's world, it's super easy to live in your own bubble and exclude thought that isn't along the same lines as what you believe. It's evident that there is little respect given from one side to the other in regular discourse and it's become toxic to the point that it is tearing the country apart.
This book won't solve that problem. But it's not for lack of trying. If everyone were forces to read it, it might actually help things. But in reality, that's never going to happen. Instead, people will continue to unfriend their conservative (or liberal) “former friends,” further pushing interaction and honest discourse to the side. Limiting their exposure to other ideas (that might actually benefit them!) so they can continue to hold doggedly to their group's ideology and making the other side seem more and more monstrous as time goes by.
While I feel strongly that the topics discussed were excellent and handled fairly, reading the book made me somewhat melancholy about things in general because I don't see any evidence that people in our current world even want to deal with the other side. People want to get emotionally involved and when groups of people get emotional, the herd mentality takes over, and unfortunately, that is never a good thing in society. Herd mentality almost always pushes things to their ultimate most disastrous outcome and that, unfortunately, is where I see things inevitably headed in Western society currently. God bless us (and save us) all.