Our Common Agenda

A few years ago, I argued that authors (and publishers) of non-fiction books needed some self-discipline; that their books’ messages could and should be contained in many fewer pages. More specifically the post suggested that we apply various tests to any book-

- does it have 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. I would like to see a summary of each chapter….. 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...

- Does it have a (short) list of recommended reading? Ideally with notes explaining the choice. Most books have a long “bibliography” which is more of 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

- Is it clearly written? – with suitable use of graphics and tables which are needed to break up and to illustrate the text….

And I also need to be persuaded that the book in question has two other features --

- respects the basic facts about an issue

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

Publishers seem to have dispensed with editors these days and allow authors to inflict books on us which lack these features. Strange because everyone knows that social media breeds in us all a need for brevity

So credit where and when credit is due – the United Nations is one of the few bodies which seems to understand this. It recently published an important 86-page report “Our Common Agenda” which rehearses the issues faced by the world but accompanied the report with a 28 page “Easy Read” with visuals and tables AND an issue for the “visually impaired”