Review by Booklist Review
Popular-science writer Gardner, who's also an adept magician, has long been the prince of scientific skeptics. Literate, amusing, and above all, reasonable, he simply insists that the wild claims about reality made by spiritualists, creationists, psychics, and maverick scientists be submitted to scrutiny by nonbelievers qualified to evaluate them. He does so in a regular column in Skeptical Inquirer, from which the first 19 pieces here are reprinted, as well as occasionally in various magazines from which the other 13 are taken. Altogether, the 32 essays constitute a debunker's delight as they strip of illusion and flummery the likes of Shirley MacLaine, creationist guru George McCready Price, parapsychologists, televangelists, psychic astronomers, and even a misguided neoconservative defender of born-again Christian pseudoscience, Irving Kristol. A well-stated leitmotif in many of them is that magicians are ideally suited to expose fraudulent physical scientists. Another delightful, absorbing addition to the Gardner canon. RO. 133 Psychical research-Controversial literature / Occultism-Controversial literature / New Age movement-Controversial literature / Science-Miscellanea / Imposters and imposture-Miscellanea [OCLC] 87-35967
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With his hard-nosed approach to investigating the paranormal, Gardner is quick to spot fraud, deception and the bias that can creep into lab results. Bringing together his columns for the journal Skeptical Inquirer and other articles, this compendium targets psychic surgery, Scientology, Uri Geller, mind-over-matter, Freud's dabbling in biorhythms, Margaret Mead's interest in the paranormal. Yet Gardner is often as close-minded, one-sided and selective in presenting evidence as those he attacks. His apparent contempt for the belief in reincarnation mars his send-up of Shirley MacLaine. His wholesale dismissal of physical evidence for UFOs ignores such meticulously documented studies as Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood's Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. Turning to the new physics, he dismisses Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields as nonsense. Gardner ignores the fact that some of today's mainstream science was yesterday's ``fringe'' science. (April) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
