Title: The Assault On Reason
Author: Al Gore
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 310
Rating: 3.5/5
The first thing to say about this one is that I’m not going to comment on Gore’s politics, although I largely agree with him. I actually think that it’s kind of a shame that he’s a politician, because he has an important message to share here and I think a lot of people will ignore it because of who he is.
It’s pretty interesting to read this book in the here and now, because it was originally written and published close to 20 years ago and it made a lot of prescient observations. It basically predicted the fake news epidemic that we’re dealing with today.
The core idea behind The Assault On Reason is that modern media is being used to manipulate people and to change their ways of thinking. For example, he spends a lot of time looking at the lies that the Bush administration told to get the support of congress and the American public when it came to the war in Iraq.
That leads me on to my main complaint about the book, which is that it’s too America-centric for a British reader like myself. At the same time, Gore was (and is) a high-profile politician in the United States, and so you can’t exactly blame him for that.
There are also times where it feels as though the entire book is just a way for Gore to complain about Bush, in the same way that there are books out there today which feel like they only exist to complain about Trump. I stand against both Bush and Trump, but that doesn’t mean that I want to read a bunch of complaints about the decisions they made. Other than that, it was good.