Customer Reviews

The Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracies: From the Knights Templar to the JFK Assassination: Uncovering the [Real] Truth Behind the World's Most Controversial Conspiracy Theories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

While I am not a serious "Conspiracy Researcher" I found this book to be very fun to read. The book presents theories and essentially leaves it up to you to decide which ones are actually real. If you want to learn more about a particular subject there are books that continue the subjects presented and handy search terms for internet browsing. While some of the conspiracies are clearly false (such as the Illuminati actually being lizard space aliens who played a part in the Kennedy assassination, or something like that) others are plausible enough to make you go "hmmm. What if?"

While I would not imagine this book would appeal to *ahem* professionals in the field, it is a good light read that has filled the hours between college classes with something to smile about. The fictional conspiracist who writes in the margins of the book gives you a sense of how these theories came into being, drawing conclusions from the text that seem ridiculous, yet discourage you from becoming similarly paranoid.

I highly recommend this book to people who enjoy unsolvable puzzles tickling their brain.

This book is a good enjoyable read, entertainment rather than a serious exploration of conspiracy theories. Its mostly sensible and factual perspective gives a credible general guide to those unfamiliar with some of the theories written about.

The hand-scribbled comments in red ink in the margins on every page from a fictional conspiracy-obsessed reader are often funny and poignant, a fine original idea which works surprisingly well in counterbalancing and highlighting likely reactions to the main text.

Some other reviewers have commented that too much credence is given by the author to the more preposterous and insane theories - like the "9/11-attacks-were-an-inside-job" cult, promoted by a small motley crew of obsessives and charlatans but primarily for which no evidence exists (for a grounded perspective, look up what Noam Chomsky says on the subject).

However, this is surely to miss the point. Monte Cook has not researched these "conspiracies" in great depth, and does not seek to explore all the details of the claims. It's a "Skeptic's Guide" - i.e. a book designed primarily to entertain, aimed at the casually interested reader who has neither time nor inclination to obsess through internet conspiracy sites and devour a large number of conspiracy books. People who have more grounded and productive lives might appreciate an easy-read guide to a very 20th/21st century phenomenon which has exploded in the internet age, and it is for this audience that the book is written.

The check-list at the end of each chapter is an interesting and bold idea, which partially succeeds. However the informed reader will see that the author has not really done in-depth homework on all the issues: as an example, at the end of the chapter on alien abductions (not a conspiracy per se but the intentional covering-up of the program and ridiculing of witnesses may well be) none of the works of Hopkins, Mack, Jacobs, Fowler or any of the esteemed and respected mainstream researchers is referenced at all. This might just be an oversight, or the author's very slight aquaintance with the subject and ignorance of the sheer quantity of data. However to the author's credit, he does acknowledge something is going on and gives the likelihood of abductions being true a 6/10.

So in summary, if you're looking for a serious tract examining the origins and propagation of conspiracy theories to the gullible, then look elsewhere. If you accept this book as entertainment, broadly on track and a good humorous read, with some useful information for the largely uninformed reader, you won't be disappointed.

It was a fun read and solid overview of the main conspiracies out there - and the various connections between them

but I found the skeptic content a little light

it was less about the conspiracies and more about the attachment of the conspirators to their flights of fancy

which, I guess it's a bit pointless to debunk for skeptics and impossible to explain why the conspirators are wrong

because no evidence of a conspiracy is always proof of the conspiracy.

nina
[...]

From the small insert I saw online about this book - it looked interesting. Unfortunately, it was difficult to understand what exactly the author was trying to accomplish. Was he trying to show theories are real or not? The red written notes only confused me. I read the whole book and it was OK, however, I will be giving it to someone who likes to be confused. Crystal

The Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracies was a used-book sale find for me - I was intrigued by the cover art because it included not only the text on the cover, but what looked to be handwritten notes in the margins. How fun, I thought - a conspiracy theory book with a sense of humor! The seemingly handwritten notes appear throughout the text - the typewritten text is presented as the explanations - and debunking - of the more popular conspiracy theories, with the handwritten marginalia apparently penciled in by a conspiracy theorist eager to prove that he knows what is "really" going on. It is a cute and novel premise and was fun to read - for the first five or six theories. After that, the marginalia got rather repetitive and became less fun and more annoying. If you have never read/heard anything about the major conspiracy theories, it is a quick read that hits the high points; if you have any prior knowledge there is not a lot of detail here and not likely to be much to hold your interest - besides the fun factor.

Monte Cook lays out the most common and most outrageous conspiracy theories in a 'factual' and amusing way. In this case, factual means by factually presenting the conspiracy theories of others. Monte makes no claims to the veracity of the various theories, and in fact makes a point in the introduction to say that he's not saying any of these are true, he's simply presenting them for the reader. In fact, he presents so many different theories on each conspiracy that they couldn't all possibly be true, as they present mutually exclusive points of view (or even realities.) In addition, both for comedic effect, and to emphasize that his tongue is firmly in cheek as he writes, throughout the book, there are comments "written" in the margins and laced throughout the text from the point of view of a true believer, who wants the reader to wholly believe all of these theories. Monte not only uses this second voice to play up the humor, but to show the reader a taste of how the actual conspiracy theorists think and communicate in their own sub-culture.

The book does a good job of giving an overview of lots of different conspiracies, from the classic Freemasons and JFK assassination, to UFOs, secret nazi moonbases, various occult theories, as well as more recent fare, such as theories about 9/11. For each short chapter in the book, Monte presents 4-6 theories, as well as a chapter summary that contains his take on the plausibility and 'high strangeness' of the theories, and also some of the more accessible books and websites on the subject, in case the reader wants to dig deeper. It's particularly fun to see connections to real world conspiracies in a variety of pop culture entertainment, such as the X-files, Fringe, the Da Vinci Code, and of course the movie Conspiracy Theory.

I strongly recommend this book. It's a relatively quick read, and is bound to have some information that is new, even to someone with more than a passing familiarity with some of the subject matter. Also, for any gamer, the book is filled to bursting with great ideas for your game. The conspiracies fit best in a modern themed game, but can easily provide inspiration for creating conspiracies in fantasy or science fiction games as well.

The Skeptic's Guide to Conpiracies is both easy to read and relate, even when you do not know all the topics mentiones there is enough information to give you a clear idea of what is he talking.

The book merely shows both facts and rumors without giving credence too most of them, just states what is given as facts, some fall in the trap of thinking this is a serious book in the matter of conspiracies, which is hardly the point of the book.

As someone mentioned earlier this book only tries to inform people in what "conspiracies" exist... at least in the mind of the american people, thinking or expecting otherwise would only bring frstration and resentment... as shown by some of the comments given to the book.

Monte is not an expert in one or other conspiracy, he just researched about them in the past to write an RPG book and now continued his research to prepare this text. For a non-fiction, humorous book this is quite an explendid one, specially because the author keeps his feet on the ground without joining the tinhat crowd.

Oddly enough, Cook's is not the first book I've read like this, presenting conspiracy theories as so patently wrong as to be self-mocking; the first would be Conspiranoia! by Devon Jackson, which focused a bit more strongly on the crank magnetism inherent in being a conspiracy believer (or, as Cook refers to them tongue-in-cheekly, "researcher"). Cook, however, goes a bit further in depth, straightfacedly recounting the fundamentals of over two dozen common conspiracy theories while inserting snarky marginal notes supposedly penned by an alternate, infinitely more paranoid version of himself (something not entirely clear until one of the notes mentions D&D).

As a longtime fan of the field of psychoceramics, a book like this is always interesting, but it's a little hard to use as an introduction to skeptical literature as it assumes you already have the critical thinking skills to see through the conspiracy garbage Cook writes about, sometimes verbatim from the pens and keyboards of the crackpots themselves. It does, however, occasionally get a little unsettling the way Cook's authorial voice drifts between observer and believer without ever quite going for the jugular, and as such may not be too clear on the author's actual opinions (without at least reading the introduction, which explains that everything in the book should be prefaced with "in theory").

This book, then, is really for people already on the inside of skepticism, who have their garbage detectors already tuned and know enough not to stray off into the territory that Cook writes about but may not be up on all the latest trends. If you give it to someone who hasn't read a good amount of Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, or Michael Shermer, you stand a good chance of winding up with a Charles Fort or Ignatius Reilly, and you definitely don't want that.

I got into this one quite a bit. Chock full of useful info about nutty conspiracies with a good sense of humor. It was kind of like Carl Sagan's Dance Party's conspiracy theory segment combined with Brian Dunning's Skeptoid. This makes an excellent gift for anyone who thinks critically but needs a source of raw data to draw from.

The title of this book is "The Skeptic's Guide to Conspiracies," and a most deceptive title it is. The author, Monte Cook, is as much a skeptic as Karl Rove is a liberal Democrat.

I started to get a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach while perusing the chapter on the JFK assassination. Imagine, after countless documentaries and published debunkings, our "skeptic" still takes the "Magic Bullet" nonsense seriously (for any remaining innocents, there was nothing magic about the bullet that struck both JFK and John Connally). Moreover, his recommended reading turns out to be a single book written by a crackpot, ignoring such exhaustive, responsible treatments as Gerald Posner's [ASIN:1400034620 Case Closed]and Vincent Bugliosi's [ASIN:0393045250 Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy].

But Cook really gives away his game in the chapter on 9/11 conspiracy theories. He makes a transparent attempt to throw the reader off the trail by acknowledging that some of the rubbish spouted by tinfoil-hatters is "outlandish." His true agenda emerges--again--in the recommended reading: two books, one by Jim Fetzer, crank-for-all-seasons, who believes that no planes hit the twin towers, and the other by the arch-charlatan David Ray Griffin, whose myriad errors and falsehoods about the NIST Report in one of his interchangeable books were dissected point-by-point in a white paper by NASA engineer Ryan Mackey (it can be found easily by Googling the author's name). Griffin's response to Mackey was to run away. Indeed, Griffin refuses to debate ANY of the army of rationalists who regard him as a fact-free mountebank.

James Randi and Michael Shermer are genuine skeptics. They write stimulating books that pay homage to reason and the scientific method, thereby showing respect for the reader's intelligence. Monte Cook wrote disingenuous drivel. By lending credence to utter crapola, he insults the reader. Quite simply, a dishonest effort that deserves a swift trip to the circular file.