How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [119]
or "Communist." We should try to control these responses, or at least know when they occur.
Finally, you must consider the last of the five questions, which is probably the hardest to answer. Does the reporter whose work you are reading himself know the facts? Is he privy to the perhaps secret thoughts and decisions of the persons about whom he is writing? Does he know all that he should know in order to give a fair and balanced account of the situation?
What we are suggesting, in other words, is that the possible bias of the author-reporter is not the only thing that has to be considered. We have heard a good deal lately about the
"management of the news"; it is important to realize that this applies not only to us, as members of the public, but also to reporters who are supposed to be "in the know." They may nat 252 HOW TO READ A BOOK
be. With the best good will in the world, with every intention of providing us with the truth of the matter, a reporter may still be "uninformed" with regard to secret actions, treaties, and so forth. He himself may be aware of this, or he may not.
In the latter case, of course, the situation is especially perilous for his reader.
You wil note that these five questions are really only variations on the questions we have said you must ask of any expository book. Knowing an author's special language, for example, is nothing more than coming to terms with him. But because current books and other material about the contemporary world pose special problems for us as readers, we have stated the questions in a diferent way.
Perhaps it is most useful to sum up the difference in a warning rather than a set of rules for reading books of this kind. The warning is this: Caveat lector L
-"
et the reader beware." Readers do not have to be wary when reading Aristotle, or Dante, or Shakespeare. But the author of any contemporary book may have-though he does not necessarily have-an interest in your understanding it in a certain way. Or if he does not, the sources of his information may have such an interest.
You should know that interest, and take it into account in whatever you read.
A Note on Digests
There is another consequence of our basic distinction-the distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding-that underlies everything we have said about reading. And this is that sometimes we have to read for information about understanding-to find out how others have interpreted the facts. Let us try to explain what this means.
For the most part, we read newspapers and magazines, and even advertising matter, for the information they contain.
The amount of such material is vast, so vast that no one today How to Read History 253
has time to read more than a small fraction of it. Necessity has been the mother of a number of good inventions in the field of such reading. The news magazines, for instance, such as Time and Newsweek, perform an invaluable function for most of us by reading the news and reducing it to its essential elements of information. The men who write these magazines are primarily readers. They have developed the art of reading for information to a point far beyond the average reader's competence.
The same is true of a publication like Reader's Digest, which professes to bring us in condensed form much that is worth our attention in current general magazines to the compact scope of a single, small volume. Of course, the very best articles, like the best books, cannot be condensed without loss.
If the essays of Montaigne, for example, were appearing in a current periodical, we would scarcely be satisfied to read a digest of them. A summary, in this case, would function well only if it impelled us to read the original. For the average article, however, a condensation is usually adequate, and often even better than the original, because the average article is mainly informational.