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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gardner the Great, November 11, 2009
This review is from: When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That (Hardcover)
I was lucky to get to know Martin Gardner's writings when I was a kid. For me, Gardner will always be the guy who wrote the celebrated and long-running (25 years) monthly column "Mathematical Games", found in the back pages of _Scientific American_. It is true that Gardner didn't always confine himself strictly to mere mathematics; his column was the first introduction I got to the pictures of M. C. Escher, for instance. And the columns were not necessarily games, although games like Reversi were often featured. The wide-ranging subjects were not just an introduction to mathematics, broadly defined, but to the oddities and the beauties that mathematics might reveal. They also showed the enormous instructive power of puzzles. The columns are now collected in lots of books, and they will never go out of date. Gardner also annotated the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and went on to annotate "Casey at the Bat" and "The Night Before Christmas". He wrote in different forums about science, hoaxes, literature, skepticism, magic, and religion. He has published over seventy books, and I learn in his latest, _When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations about This and That_ (Hill and Wang), that he is 94 years old, and resides in an assisted living home. And still writing! Thank goodness, he is still writing! His current book is a miscellany, reprints of pieces published in many arenas. "The only thing these scribblings have in common," he writes, "is that I wrote them all." That's good enough for me!
The essays herein cover a lot of territory. There is politics, like a chapter on Ann Coulter. "I never took Ann seriously until I read her fifth book, _Godless: The Church of Liberalism_." Coulter promotes Intelligent Design, which is religious creationism in as best a new scientific guise as it can muster. Coulter says that Christianity fuels everything she writes, so Gardner wants to know what sort of Christian she is, so she could inform us of the background for her insults against scientists. There is a review here of Frank Tipler's book _The Physics of Christianity_, and it is scathing about Tipler's belief that miracles are not supernatural events violating laws of science, but highly improbable natural events performed deliberately by God without such violations. Gardner reports sadly that this absurd book is not a hoax. Gardner is not an atheist; one of his chapters has a title borrowed from a similar one from Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not an Atheist". He believes in God, but is content to confess "... that I have no basis whatever for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exists and that I and others will not cease to exist." He also confesses that this is a leap of faith that he understands "as little as I understand the essence of a photon." There are a couple of "Mathematical Games" style chapters, one about the Fibonacci sequence (always fertile ground for recreational math) and one on tiling chessboards with L-shaped tiles. The title of his book comes from the 1895 poem "Evolution", the only poem ever published by Langdon Smith, about whom Gardner knows more than anyone in the world, and knows next to nothing because no one besides him has taken much interest in Smith. "Evolution" is a sweet, comic, romantic poem of 108 lines. It starts:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
And by the time of the last verse, the couple are sitting at Delmonico's and toasting their evolution from amphibians to mammals and to hominids, quite a performance. In the chapter "Why I Am Not a Paranormalist", Gardner excoriates the astrological beliefs of President and Mrs. Reagan and the support of the teaching of creationism by President George W. Bush. A chapter on Isaac Newton reminds us that as great as his writings were on physics and mathematics, he wrote a lot more about alchemy and about his strange religious beliefs, including his opposition to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. "What else might he have discovered," wonders Gardner, "had he not squandered his energy and talents on alchemy and Biblical exegesis!" If you are already a Gardner fan, you don't need to be told to get this book; if you are not yet, here is a perfect introduction to the broad interests and sharp, entertaining writing of a great American original.
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not much math and the rest is too preachy for me, December 15, 2009
This review is from: When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That (Hardcover)
I grew up on Gardner's mathematical puzzle books, and they are a treasure. This book isn't in that category though, in subject matter or quality.
Parts III and IV contain the math and logic stuff, and it's about 35 pages total. Nothing special there; it doesn't approach the quality of his earlier puzzle efforts. I suppose it's hard to keep coming up with classics, but nonetheless there's just not enough here to buy the book expecting vintage Gardner puzzle work.
The rest is mostly Gardner going on about various subjects that bother him. I actually agree with him on many of the areas he covers, especially the irritations of bogus science. But the treatment is heavy-handed and preachy. It doesn't have the light touch I expect from Gardner.
For example, I don't care for Ann Coulter myself and I consider her creationist stance positively ludicrous, but reading Gardner tear into her was just boring. His ruminations on religion and politics are similarly long-winded, unoriginal, and just not worth spending your time on. He picks on religious nuts I've never heard of, and expresses admiration for characters such as Norman Thomas, who he describes as "America's leading socialist". Fine, Martin, if you lean that way, but that's certainly not why I read your books.
This isn't a particularly long book (about 230 pages) but it felt long. If you are looking for something upbeat and entertaining, look somewhere else.
** Update 23 May 2010 ***
Martin Gardner passed away yesterday. He was 95. May he rest in peace.
He wrote many, many excellent books in his lifetime, for which many of us are immensely grateful. Unfortunately, this isn't one of them.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but tiring, March 20, 2010
This review is from: When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That (Hardcover)
This was a library book read.
I picked up the book based upon some of the interesting descriptions of the chapters and the uniqueness of the author. However, I am a firm believer that one person can not know everything, I do not believe the author shares that belief with me.
The book is written at a high level and at times lost me. However for the most part a majority of the book made me think. I, like others, was turned off by the ' I am right, they are wrong' mentality of the author (though I did agree with his view, not the way he presented it.)
Additionally, the majority of the book is reprinted articles from his monthly article, or there is an entire chapter that comes from another book, thus if you are a long term fan of the author (I had no clue who he was until he told me) you might be disappointed.
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