the Verification Habit: How True Stories Were Found in Open Sources, and You Can Find Them Too

On the first page of a book about telling truth from fiction, the author gets a fact wrong. Then he shows you how he caught it. Most books about misinformation lecture you, or hand you a list of websites dead within a year. This one teaches you to find the truth yourself, using only sources anyone can open. To uncover the real stories behind the great myths of the First World War, the author dug each one out from a chair at home, with a handful of plain moves anyone can learn. And he kept getting it wrong first, reaching for the dramatic version, the flattering one, the story that fit. Each time, the same method caught the error his confidence had missed. That is the argument of the book, made the only honest way: not "trust me, I am reliable," but "no one is reliable, so here is the procedure that works anyway." Name the claim. Find the first telling. Read the document. Build the boring explanation. Stop at the edge of the evidence. The tools change; the moves do not, and by the end they are yours.