Table of Contents: PREVIEW: HOW THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU PART ONE: Chapters 1-3 How to Read with a Purpose PART TWO: Chapters 4-10 How to React to Changing Levels of Meaning PART THREE: Chapters 11-17 How to Recognize the Author's Pattern of Thinking PART FOUR: Chapters 18-23 How to Think Along with an Author in the Pattern He Sets Up PART FIVE: Chapters 24-28 How to Skim Successfully by Following an Author's Pat tern of Thinking PART SIX: Chapters 29–32 How to Read for Pleasure and Profit
"About the end of the book" This book aims at all times to be functional-short on theory, long on practice. There are a number of things you can expect from it. Not every person who reads it will accomplish everthing the book demands, but in general these are the important effects you may, and should, look for early in your work: A feeling of greater courage in approching new material. The ability to "get into" books or other reading matter more quickly, more happily. Less distraction from outside influence while you are reading. Greater awareness of an author's deeper meaning. Sharper understanding of the all-over pattern of a piece of work, of whatever length, A sense of deeper involment in the content of what you are reading. A fuller comprehension of both the author's purpose in writing and your own purpose in reading what he has written. The capacity to stay with a work for longer periods of time, to respond to it on a deeper level than heretofore, to understand it more clearly and more quickly, to retain it longer, to recall it more accurately. An all-encompassing sense of greater accomplishment in most reading situations.
Norman Lewis (28 June 1908 – 22 July 2003) was an influential British journalist and a prolific author. Best known for his travel writing, he also wrote twelve novels and several volumes of autobiography. Subjects he explored in his travel writing include life in Naples during the Allied liberation of Italy (Naples '44); Vietnam and French colonial Indochina (A Dragon Apparent); Indonesia (An Empire of the East); tribal peoples of India (A Goddess in the Stones); Sicily and the Mafia (The Honoured Society and In Sicily); and the destruction caused by Christian missionaries in Latin America and elsewhere (The Missionaries). His newspaper article entitled "Genocide in Brazil" (1969) prompted the creation of Survival International—an organisation dedicated to the protection of indigenous peoples around the world. Graham Greene described Lewis as "one of the best writers, not of any particular decade, but of our century".