Today Marshmallow reviews a little book about big ideas: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, written by Ali Almossawi and illustrated by Alejandro Giraldo, first published in 2013.
Marshmallow’s Quick Take: If you like nonfiction books with drawings, or if you are curious to learn more about how to make good arguments, then this might be the book for you.
Marshmallow’s Summary (with Spoilers): This cute book covers a surprisingly serious topic in a surprisingly simple way. This is quite simply an illustrated book of different logical fallacies. (According to Wikipedia, “a fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning in the construction of an argument that may appear to be well-reasoned if unnoticed.”) Each fallacy has a couple short paragraphs of explanations and a drawing of human-like animals to demonstrate a different bad argument based on a different logical fallacy. Each description is about a page long (though keep in mind that it is with a relatively large font size on a small, square page). The drawings are big and take up another page which makes it very visually appealing to be able to see the description on the left page with the image on the right. The images are hand-drawn (I think) and are in black and white.
Marshmallow’s Review: An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Ali Almossawi is extremely well written and extremely easy to understand and read. Younger bunnies could comprehend practically all of the book’s content (since the examples are fairly basic). Yet, this book conveys an important message: Bad arguments are disturbingly common, in daily life and on the larger scale.
Be it political or personal, people are constantly making bad arguments based on logical fallacies to sway others. And unfortunately, this approach often works. Having a good understanding of how to evaluate arguments based on logical reasoning is a necessity in a world overwhelmed with poor arguments and fallacies meant to deceive.
I think this book is a good read for bunnies of all ages because of the simple but useful explanations and descriptions of each logical fallacy. The illustrating artist, Alejandro Giraldo, has a clear, consistent style which draws you in (forgive the pun).
Overall, this is a very neat and clean book that is entertaining and informative to read. It can help develop skills that all bunnies will likely need to use for their whole lives. I think it can also be useful if you yourself are writing arguments. It helps you recognize some of your own argumentative mistakes so that you can make better claims. As a bunny who is into Speech and Debate, I know that this is a very useful skill. But for all students in general who need to learn to write so they can defend their beliefs and ideas, this book is a great source to improve their ability to refute and strengthen arguments.
In summary, An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments is a comprehensive guide to living in a world where the truth is not always clear. But this illustrated book of bad arguments makes things clearer, and if I haven’t proven this to you yet, then I guess I must be using some sort of logical fallacy. And the only way for you to find out whether I have is to read this book!
Marshmallow’s Rating: 100%.
BookBunnies 
That is an incredibly useful book and is sorely needed in today’s society. I can see where Marshmallow can apply these concepts in her speech and debate activities.
I wonder if the book also covered the “straw man” argument? An example of it is: if a parent tells their child they can’t see their friends tonight and the child responds, “Why do you hate me?” the child’s response is a straw man argument because it creates an exaggeration.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/writing/what-is-straw-man-argument#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20ways%20a,because%20it%20creates%20an%20exaggeration.
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I won’t argue with people like that. A certain politician comes to mind.
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