Non-Fiction

Everything in this wing actually happened, which should worry you more than it does. Capote invented the nonfiction novel and muddied every fact he touched; In Cold Blood is shelved here as literature and as a warning. Diamond will explain the last thirteen thousand years in one sweep; read Guns, Germs, and Steel, then read its critics, then decide. Kahneman spent a career proving your judgment lies to you, and some of the studies he trusted later failed to replicate, which rather proves the point. I shelve the arguments, not the conclusions. If you want books that agree with you, you want a different library. Come in when you would rather be corrected.

Capote called it nonfiction and then invented its final scene, the graveyard meeting that gives the book its consolation. Quotes were reconstructed from memory; he took no notes. His tenderness for Perry Smith bends the moral weight away from the Clutters, and the book needed the hangings to end, a fact Capote understood and waited on.

— against In Cold Blood

Diamond states his thesis in the prologue and restates it roughly every thirty pages for four hundred more. Geography-as-destiny flattens what it cannot model: culture, contingency, the choices people actually made. Read the opening chapters and the epilogue; the middle is the same lecture delivered again with new place names.

— against Guns, Germs, and Steel

Chapter four, the priming chapter, collapsed in the replication crisis, and Kahneman admitted he had placed too much faith in underpowered studies; read that section as history, not science. The rest runs long and repeats itself: by the two selves, the same anchoring and loss-aversion experiments have lectured you three times over five hundred pages.

— against Thinking, Fast and Slow