Robert H. Frank's book Falling Behind is a short, lucid and gripping account of what is happening to the middle class” (Alexander Kemestrios Ben). This is what a reviewer on Amazon.com commented about Frank's book Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. To engage readers and support their ideas, most argumentative nonfiction books use statistics, logical reasoning, personal anecdotes, and real-life examples. While all of these strategies should make for an interesting and compelling argument, the question is not how interesting the book is, but rather is it or is it not a quality argumentative nonfiction book? Before we answer this question, we need to consider what makes a quality argumentative nonfiction book. A quality argumentative nonfiction book should engage readers with fun and unique ideas and also have well-explained and simplified ideas that are easy for the audience to understand. By these standards, Falling Behind is in part a quality argumentative nonfiction book because, while it fully meets the criterion of having entertaining and unique ideas, it only partially meets the criterion of having well-explained and simplified ideas. In addition to being “the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management,” Robert H. Frank is also “co-director of the Padua Seminar in Business Ethics at the Stern School of Business.” (“Faculty and Research”). He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Georgia Tech, a master's degree in statistics, and a Ph.D. in economics” from the University of California at Berkeley (“Faculty and Research”). Frank has written and co-written many books, as well as various...... middle of paper......zon.com. Amazon, 2014. Web. 10 February 2014. “Falling Behind: How Growing Inequality Hurts the Middle Class.” Goodreads. Goodreads, 2014. Web. 10 February 2014. Finn, Daniel. "Smart for one, stupid for all." Commonweal 135.5 (2008): 22+. Academic OneFile. Network. February 6, 2014Frank, Robert H. Falling Behind: How Growing Inequality Hurts the Middle Class. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. Print.Gross, Daniel. "Your neighbor's stash." NYTimes.com. Ed. Andrea Rosenthal. New York Times, August 5, 2007. Web. February 6, 2014. “Herpangina” MedlinePlus. United States National Library of Medicine, February 3, 2014. Web. February 6, 2014"Robert H. Frank." Contemporary authors online. Detroit: Gale, 2013. Gale biography in context. Network. February 5, 2014. Whaley, Mary. “Getting Left Behind: How Growing Inequality Hurts the Middle Class.” Book List July 1, 2007: 15. EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Network. February 6. 2014.
tags