I’ve often wondered how my life might have been different if I had been given a good course in critical thinking skills in high school or college. Had I been so fortunate, this book would have been the best text I could imagine for such a course.

A lot of the information covered here was familiar to me from other reading I’ve done in the last few years, but this book is by far the most comprehensive collection of all of the things one needs to know to effectively evaluate the ideas we are exposed to about the world around us and how it works. It covers everything from the basics of possibility and logic, what makes an argument good or bad, different ways of knowing and perceiving, cognitive biases that can skew our objectivity and the foundations of scientific thought processes. Interspersed within the more technical portions of the text are sidebars applying the principles at hand to various popular extraordinary claims such as instances of apparent ESP and things like the Amityville haunting.

This book is an actual textbook. Though the authors do a fairly good job of making it readable by using these sidebars and other interesting examples for much of what they cover, there are still a few sections that were rather on the dry side. Though this made parts of the book a bit of a slog, what I learned from it was more than valuable enough for me to keep going.

Among the sections that I personally found most useful were the discussions of how quirks in our perceptual systems can cause us to misinterpret what’s happening around us, the problems with appealing to mystical experience as a way of knowing, and the discussion of just how damaging it can be to believe things on insufficient evidence. In a chapter called “Case Studies in the Extraordinary,” the critical thinking processes outlined earlier are applied to the juicy topics of homeopathy, dowsing, UFO abductions, communicating with the dead, near-death experiences, ghosts and conspiracy theories. The authors are careful to refrain from saying definitively whether these things are or aren’t real, but instead show the reader how to evaluate the evidence and come to their own conclusions about which ideas are genuinely worthy of consideration. Highly recommended for anyone who thinks.