HOW TO BE RIGHT
…IN A WORLD GONE WRONG
JAMES O’BRIEN
WH Allen, 224pp, £12.99
‘I have probably had more opportunities to hear from ordinary people over the last few years than almost anyone else on the planet,’ trumpets LBC talkshow host James O’brien in his introduction — a claim Oscar Ricketts on the Vice website dismissed, pointing out that he is ‘just talking to a small collection of people who want or need to call into [his] show’.
‘O’brien builds his chapters, on Islam, Brexit, political correctness, LGBT, feminism and Trump,’ explained Andrew Anthony in the
Guardian, ‘around transcripts of his phone-ins. If you find these interactions pretty excruciating on the radio, believe me they don’t improve in print.’ O’brien’s central point is how easy it is to knock the bigots down but Johanna Thomas
Corr in the Times found it an unfair tactic: ‘You almost (almost) feel sorry for the bloviating “Johns and Bobs and Andys” as he terms his callers,’ she said. ‘They are, by and large, amateur pugilists. O’brien, is picking easy fights.’
All the reviewers were irritated by his smugness. ‘Again and again, he seeks to play the role of The West
Wing’s President Bartlett,’ wrote Ricketts, ‘who deploys facts and reason in the face of emotional ignorance and is always, always right.’ Fiona Sturges, also in the
Guardian, thought O’brien had ‘a more detailed and scholarly book in him’, while Ricketts concluded that in a world of outdated certainties the very title of this book was ‘comically hubristic’ and in the end only served to make matters worse.