Why we need shorter non-fiction books – with chapter summaries

As I reel under the number of books pouring from publishers, I have come to place more and more importance on three requirements which I look for in any book 

- first a solid Introduction – or Preface. This is the author’s chance to show (s)he understands how overwhelmed we are by the choices; to offer us a convincing argument about why (s)he has to inflict yet another book on us. And the best way to do that is to give a brief summary of what others have written and identify the missing elements which make a book necessary. And I would like, in addition, to see a summary of each chapter…..I have always liked the old habit of prefacing a book chapter with an explanation of what that chapter will deal with. When I got hold recently of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism; (1928) it was to discover that his Table of Contents has no fewer than 33-pages... 

- the second thing I look for in a non-fiction book is at the end - a (short) list of recommended reading, ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which, I’ve taken to calling a “virility test” - demonstrating nothing more than (a barely compressed sense of) superiority. I want instead to see a shorter (and annotated) list for several reasons - partly to smoke out the author’s prejudices; partly to see how honest (s)he is; and partly to see how well (s)he writes   

- the third check I run is for the clarity of writing – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed both to break up and to illustrate the text….

All of these requirements are fairly quickly established – the book either offers such features – or it doesn’t. The decline and rise of democracy – a global history from antiquity to today by David Stasavage (2020), for example, is a book I came across yesterday and checked out. It doesn’t bother with any of these features – and is therefore quickly dismissed. It doesn’t even mention John Keane’s classic “The Rise and Fall of Democracy”

But I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has three other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue;

- has a coherent “narrative structure” (see Richard Evans’ comments in the previous post)

- tries to be fair to the various sides of the key arguments on the issue 

And this can be done only by checking the reviews.

But why, I suddenly thought, do authors insist these days on giving us such hefty tomes?

Everyone’s attention span – we are told – is declining….particularly that of the younger generation.

And so many non-fiction books are just recycling arguments we’re already familiar with…

The obvious thing is to go back to the Victorian habit of summarising the basic argument of a book – along with an annotated bibliography – and to offer it as a TASTER of maximum 100 pages

Take, for example, a superb newly-released book I have been reading today - Commanding hope – the power we have to renew a world in peril; by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It is an easy read; and addresses the issue which few such environmental books do – namely why do people resist the message about global warming? And why indeed do the rest of us do little more than token gestures? 

It’s the first book I’ve come across which is devoted exclusively to this question of intellectual resistance - with 360 pages, its basic argument could be compressed into 100 pages - as a taster - an idea I'm now testing with "Dispatches to the Next Generation - a taster" (see top-right column of blog)

update; I'm glad to see I'm not alone in searching for ways to discover whether a book will be useful  https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/surgical-reading-how-to-read-12-books