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64 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
My introduction to catastrophic theory, November 20, 2000
While researching Carl Sagan's debunker career, I stumbled into Charles Ginenthal's book about five years ago. It has been an interesting experience to glimpse the world of catastrophism. I have corresponded and talked with most of the main players in the Velikovskian debate today, have read thousands of pages of material, traded plenty of mail, and have read thousands of emails regarding the issue. I have heard Ginenthal called an "apologist" for Velikovsky by a prominent Velikovsky follower, yet the harshest critic of Velikovsky's followers admitted to me that Sagan was less than straightforward in his critique of Velikovsky's work, and that the scientific establishment treated Velikovsky shabbily, with Sagan leading the underhanded attack. As Ginenthal makes clear, the issue of his book is not if Velikovsky was right, but how the scientific establishment treated him. Like it or not, Ginenthal's book is nearly the only book on the Velikovsky controversy in print these days. It is a lucid introduction to the issues. Velikovsky is one in a long line of catastrophic theorists, and catastrophic theory has been gaining scientific respectability these days, as well as movies being made of comets slamming into earth (though Velikovsky theorized planetary catastrophic agents instead of comets). I have spent long hours trying to assess Velikovsky's thesis. I had to admit that it would take me many years to properly assess his widely interdisciplinary thesis, and I plan to take up the assessment of an aspect of his work in the near future, as a hobby. I will not have anything worthwhile to say on the subject for at least ten years. While I do not subscribe to Velikovsky's planetary billiards scenario, I also cannot call his work worthless. His work is still relevant, fifty years after it was first published. While many works of science and scholarship rapidly fade to oblivion, that Velikovsky's theories are still heatedly debated today is a testament to their worth in being considered. While I have seen Ginenthal take serious heat for his book, on charges of sloppily and/or dishonest science and scholarship, it would be well for the reader to compare Ginenthal's book to Sagan's AAAS undertaker's job on Velikovsky's thesis, reproduced in Scientists Confront Velikovsky. Ginenthal addresses virtually every sentence of Sagan's critique. Sagan betrayed his sense of fair play after dealing Velikovsky's work its public deathblow at the AAAS conference (which the astronomer Tom Van Flandern called a "sneak attack"), as he never engaged in a public discussion of Velikovsky's work again. That is not the practice of honest science, but the work of a hack, using his reputation to outweigh his arguments. In that respect, Ginenthal is to be commended for his work, as he exposes critical aspects of Sagan's execution of his debunker's craft. Others are more critical of Ginenthal's work than I am, while others laud it. Depending on whom you talk to, he gets one star or five. It is an extremely polarized discussion. I will go for the middle-of-the-road, giving him three stars, and lean towards more stars, not less, at this time. After years of looking into the matter, I have to reserve my judgment, except to agree that Sagan was indeed a poor and even dishonest debunker, not only regarding Velikovsky's thesis, but also in other areas on science's fringes... Whatever one might say about Ginenthal, he ably defends his work (has admitted some of his errors to me) and is generous with his time. You could do much worse than spend your time and money on Ginenthal's book.
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