by David H. Fischer
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Product Description
"If one laughs when David Hackett Fischer sits down to play, one will stay to cheer. His book must be read three times: the first in anger, the srcond in laughter, the third in respect....The wisdom is expressed with a certin ruthlessness. Scarcly a major historian escapes unscathed. Ten thousand members of the AmericanHistorical Association will rush to the index and breathe a little easier to find their names absent.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent book but should be read thoughtfully, 2008-04-24
This is an excellent book. Will try not to be repetitious. As a reader you should be mindful about Mr. F assumptions. Mr. F is an empiricist and this greatly affects his characterization of some of the fallacies. Mr. F is fallacious by his own standards in this respect. The other assumption that undergirds his work is pluralism. I do thank Mr. F for accepting the idea that in order for some of these fallacies to exist you have to make certain assumptions(in his conclusion). I would simply caution readers to not be persuaded on all accounts; some of his fallacies are also dependent upon a worldview. In spite of these comments, Mr. F deserves praise for his work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 For all writers and all readers, 2008-03-19
This sentence and the dotted line and below added 6/9/08.
Fischer's goal is to improve the writing of history by teaching historians
how to avoid many common errors. Other reviewers have observed that writers
in other social disciplines could use many of the same lessons. Still others
have expanded the audience that could benefit to readers. I second their claim.
This is a very useful book for everyone that writes to explain to others, or
to persuade others. It is also useful to the consumers of those writings.
It has greater utility to readers than to writers, since there are so many
more of us.
The examples Fischer supplies are from the field of history, but the fallacies
are not limited to that field or even to the social "sciences". While reading
the book I thought of writings by economists, financial planners, educators,
critics of theater, wine, food, architecture, books, etc, economists, politicians,
preachers, environmentalists, hobbyists, and of course advertisers.
Fischer is kind and generous. He finds much to praise in most of the works that
contain the fallacies he uses as bad examples. He also claims that most of the
fallacies are simple mistakes, not intentionally deceiving. He may be right.
But some of the other fields are more likely to contain more than innocent
errors. The cost to the general public can also be much greater.
Fischer is also a fine writer. Every few pages there is a phrase or sentence
worth copying into your "Wow, I wish I'd said that!" notebook.
I found one more advantage to this book. The examples are fully documented.
I found several titles that seemed interesting covering topics I had never
even thought about.
This is a book worth rereading every few years.
............................................................
Fischer credits Jeremy Bentham's Work about Political Fallacies as the
source of many topics in his own book. I decided to read it, but this
site does not have it, so my local library tracked down a copy. It is
definitely worth reading, and worth at least four stars. It covers many
more fallacies than Fischer, perhaps because politicians are more devious
than historians. It has the heavy prose of the era and is thus a slower
read than Fischer. Bentham points out the few cases that are exceptions
to each fallacy. He describes each defense that might be made against his
attack and then debunks them. This is fair, but slow. Bentham wrote
during the rotten borough era in England. It is interesting to note how
the same fallacies are still used by politicians and lawyers today.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Belongs on every historians reference shelf, 2007-04-26
I have just read Fischer's work and have ordered my own copy. In my specialty I have read many works that commit many of the fallacies that Fischer describes. I am going to read this book carefully again, both to improve my work and to better understand that of others. Folks who run history graduate education programs need to attend to Fischer's concerns. Editors of scholarly journals and series need to read this again to better inform their work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Entertaining/instructive catalogue of historians' errors, 2006-12-06
Though hardly an earth-shattering assessment of the state of the historians' art, ca. 1970, HF is nonetheless a useful and not infrequently entertaining disquisition on the perils and pitfalls of fallacious reasoning in historical argumentation. DH pulls no punches, assembling a dense catalogue of errors of divers type, by type, that have been committed by a wide range of historians (mostly practitioners of US history). The result is a bit of slog, not quite the systematic set of logical guidelines for errant historians or would-be historians that HF might have envisioned, but certainly -- and resoundingly -- the seeds of one. It was particularly sobering to read, at several decades' remove, DF's concerns to justify the practice of history to an increasingly skeptical public. The drumbeat of a- and anti-historicism goes on. DF's cautions -- to historians and to critical readers of history -- are as important today as they were when he first published them. I highly recommend this book.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
One of the best treatments of Historical understanding., 2006-08-03
Having read this book several times, Fischer's insight is not fallacious. I have lent it to friends and never get the copies back. That is why I do not lend books and have two copies of this title.
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