Book Review: Factfulness

Factfulness by Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnelund, and Ola Rosling

Published: 2018

Genre: Non-fiction

My rating: 5/5 stars

This is never going to be an all-out book reviewing site, but since I do read my fair share of books, I wanted to share my thoughts on some of them, especially the ones I really enjoyed.

We’re going to start in an odd place. Well, odd for me, since I don’t read all that many non-fiction books. Biographies just aren’t my thing; self-help books mostly seem to be quackery, to be honest; and while narative non-fiction can be interesting, I find that true stories often (not always) just aren’t as interesting as pure fiction can be. But that’s just me.

Factfulness was different, though. It’s rare that I bother to read an entire book on any given subject (I did enough of that in my school years), but this book was hard to put down.

First of all, Hans Rosling (now, sadly, deceased) was an excellent speaker. Engaging, polite, informative, and easy to understand. And the authors of Factfulness really managed to bring that to the page as well, making it an interesting but also incredibly easy read.

The book rarely repeats itself, yet it doesn’t overload the reader with hard-to-follow information either. It builds its case nice and steady using ten relatively simple examples.

Of course, Factfulness isn’t just a well written book. It does what any good science/pop-science book should do. It informs the reader, using solid arguments and data. And Rosling did have a ton of data to support his thesis: The world is, overall, gradually becoming a better place despite many people believing the opposite.

The news love the shocking events, the great dramas, the outliers, and the text books we all read in school were outdated by the time we glanced at the first page. This is why so many of us in the wealthiest countries have a distorted image of what the world, especially poorer countries, is like.

We tend to mentally cluster countries that have developed very differently economically and socially. We tend to blame cultural background instead of economical standing. And we are mostly oblivioius as to just how rapid the positive change has occured in the wealthier countries.

This is why I would definitely recommend Factfulness as a must read book. It will, most likely, leave you more informed as to the actual state of the world. It will, probably, leave you with a more positive view at the world (which isn’t a small boon considering what the world has been through in 2020/2021). And chances are, it will keep you entertained all through to the end.