Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Witty, informative, and still relevant, September 5, 2000
Gardner's work debunking pseudo-science of all kinds is even more relevant today than it was when it was written nearly 50 years ago. Although it has been 30 years since I read it, I can still remember many of the funnier highlights of the book.
For example, some of his revelations on crackpot scientists are truly hilarious. In his chapter on health and health food faddists he discusses Gaylord Hauser, who was a famous name in the area long before people like Adele Davis, Ewel Gibbons, and so on.
Gardner mentions Hauser's famous theory that acidosis of the blood is responsible for just about all health ills, and recommended fasting to counteract it. Unfortunately, anyone even slightly familiar with human physiology will tell you that fasting actually causes acidosis, a little fact apparently Hauser overlooked. Another great theory killed by a nasty little fact, I guess.
Then there is the chapter, "Down with Einstein," where crackpots par excellence try to prove they are smarter than Einstein. One guy by the name of Gillette (no relation to the razor concern) says of Einstein, "As a physicist, Einstein is not a bad violinist," and insists his "Back-screwing Theory of Gravitation" is far superior to Einstein's. According to Gillette, "...gravity is naught but the kicked-back nut of the back-screwing bolt of gravitation." As you can see, Einstein is not the only genius physicist out there with a good theory or two.
The one person Gardner actually seems to like in this book is Charles Fort, the journalist who himself reported on much of the pseudo-science of his day. Fort was a diligent and witty writer in the area who seems to have been fascinated by things like UFOs, the paranormal, strange phenomena, and bizarre scientific theories, and who appeared content to write about and document it all without really believing any of it himself. The Fortean Society he founded to carry on his work is still around today.
I could go on and on about all the funny things in this book, but I will stop here and let you discover them for yourself if I've managed to peak your interest. This is one of the most entertaining books of science writing ever published, and really qualifies as a classic in its own right that is still as relevant as the day it was published 50 years ago.
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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic of debunkology, endlessly entertaining, August 27, 2004
This book is, even in its second edition, half a century old, and sometimes that shows. Lysenko is long dead, and in fact the Soviet Union in which he did his crackpot biology doesn't exist anymore. Several other kooks that Gardner writes about have long been forgotten. On the other hand, Dianetics is still around, and crackpot science in general is alive and well -- do I have to remind the reader of the Alien Autopsy on tv?
In a general sense, then, this book is still very much relevant in that it shows how pseudo science and pseudo scientists work by blithely ignoring facts, expounding theories with more support in rethoric than in actual facts.
My favourite chapter is the one about Alfred Lawson. Who? It doesn't matter. The man is so hilarious that he would have to be invented, if he hadn't invented himself first. "When I look into the vastness of space and see the marvelous workings of its contents, I sometimes think that I was born ten or twenty thousand years ahead of time" according the great man's autobiography. And Gardner quotes this with a straight face, even where possible defending his silly theories.
That is in fact what I like most about this book. Gardner does a good job of debunking, but he is never malicious towards his subjects, regarding them almost lovingly as wayward children. Thus this book stands as a classic of science writing, and is worth reading regardless the importance of its immediate subjects.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timless essays a must-read for all, October 27, 1997
Although written in the 1950s, Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies is one of the masterpieces of science. Gardner tackles both seriously and humorously the pseudoscience of his day, including flying saucers, flat-earthers, dianetics, medical cults, dowsers, orogonomy, Atlantis historians, and many more. From Trofim Lysenko's efforts to overthrow Darwin's theory of evolution for Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics in Russia, to the hilarious chapter on Charles Fort's philosophy of "accept everything but believe nothing" in our own country, Gardner paints a marvelous portrait that will make the reader roll their eyes and smile at some people's credulity as well as be shocked at how far some will go to search for and believe in what isn't there. What strikes me as the most prominent thing about this book is that he almost seems to be addresing the pseudoscience/antiscience of our day instead of decades past. In summary, his essays will bring the reader's mind to a more a skeptical level of thinking when faced with current claims that resemble those of yester-year. Gardner's book is a fitting prequel to Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World as it not only debunks the false claims of pseudoscience, but also educates the reader's mind about what real science is while maintaining an apt for wonder.
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