Summary

Chapter 4, “The Parts You Don’t Read,” lists various kinds of front matter and back matter which Foster is confident most readers skip in a nonfiction work but which he emphasizes reveal different kinds of valuable information. From the title page, to the table of contents, to the index at the back of a book, Foster convinces the reader that “reading for information is a utilitarian enterprise” (46) and that thus familiarizing oneself with the front and back matter of nonfiction books is helpful. He uses Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” to illustrate how indexes can be helpful in locating information about a given figure when the book is long, the information specific, and the task daunting.

Chapter 5, “It...