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Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner Hardcover – 2013

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Martin Gardner (Author)
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Martin Gardner (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars 25 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr (2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0691159912
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691159911
  • Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #280,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 starsSomewhat disorganized bits and pieces about a fascinating guy
By Lawrence S. Lerner on October 29, 2013
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I've been a Gardner fan since reading his Fads And Fallacies more than 50 years ago. This book seems to be a garnering of bits and pieces he left lying around when he died at a ripe old age, laden with honor. They were assembled by his friends (especially, I think, Persi Diaconis) as a final tribute. The resulting book contains a hodgepodge of information - not always in logical order - that is interesting to anyone who is a Gardner fan - his childhood in Tulsa, his years in Chicago, including his formative experience at the University of Chicago, and his struggles to make a living as a professional editor and writer. One must overlook the disorganization and gaps and repetitions of what Gardner published elsewhere because what it contains is a lot of fun to read.
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1.0 out of 5 starsExtremely disappointing
By Bob Orr on December 16, 2013
Format: Hardcover
I found this book extremely disappointing. I have been a fan of Gardiner since I first started reading Mathematical Games in the Scientific American about forty years ago. I have read and own most of the books he wrote, and I found each and every one of them fascinating and amusing. The present book looks as if it has been assembled posthumously from various fragments. It is repetitive and rambling. The final chapter about his beliefs is much better covered in his book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener". There is nothing in this book that is not covered better in books he actually wrote. If you want disconnected meaningless anecdotes about friends and family, it may interest you. Otherwise, do not buy this book. Use the money you save to buy one of the excellent books that he actually wrote.
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3.0 out of 5 starsAnecdotal and episodic
By Dick Marti on December 19, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Interesting anecdotal autobiography---up to a point. He was doing ok with that format until he got to the chapter about his wife Charlotte. Then suddenly everything in the last 30 years of his life was compressed into one rushed chapter so that the book could be ended. There is no sense of how the events described earlier in the book meshed with his later family life----if they did. And there are few dates given, so we don't know except by detective work when things happened. He could have used an editor to organize the material into better time sequence.
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3.0 out of 5 starsMartin Gardner fans take care
By Dr. D. Groce on December 21, 2013
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
The "Scientific American" column on mathematical games was written by Martin Gardner for decades. It was always the first article I would turn to when I received my latest issue of "Scientific American." This book was written as an autobiography by Martin Gardner to be published after his death. It is interesting but it is not what I expected, and, in my estimation, not as good as any one of his columns. I did not complete reading the book.
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1.0 out of 5 starsGenerally a disappointment
By Rory Coker on November 17, 2013
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This slender autobiography will be a chore to read, even for long-time admirers of Mr. Gardner. It is very much an old man's book, meaning that it is incessantly rambling and digressive. Like many such books I have read, it tends to pile on detail where no reader would care, and ignore detail where most readers would most want it. For example, in Chicago and later in New York Gardner "sessioned" with most of the most famous magicians of the day, yet there is hardly a word in the book about them, other than a listing of their names. [The book is crammed with name-dropping.] And then Gardner goes into endless detail about two long-forgotten cranks, Hutchins and Adler, who were rattling about at the University of Chicago when Gardner was there as an undergraduate.

Gardner also displays some exceedingly strange and unhealthy obsessions. For instance, he goes into great detail about his attempts to find out if numerous philosophers and thinkers had any religious beliefs, even when the individuals in question not only never mentioned any religious tendencies in public, but even never mentioned them to wives or children.

There is also a lot of self-promotion (an annoying feature of about the last 10 years of Gardner's literary output). His novel THE FLIGHT OF PETER FROMM seems to be mentioned on just about every other page, and another late novel, VISITORS FROM OZ, gets mentioned on what seem to be at least a quarter of the book's pages.

Gardner does explain how a man who in high school and college had little interest in math became, through his long-running SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN column, a gateway for millions of readers into the world of 20th Century math, and a close friend of many of the most famous 20th Century mathematicians.Read more ›
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1.0 out of 5 starsI should have been more skeptical about this book!
By mojosmom VINE VOICE on May 3, 2014
Format: Hardcover
Back in the olden days, when Scientific American had more text than graphics and the articles ran to more than a column length, I used to read my dad's copies and enjoyed the Mathematical Games column written by Martin Gardner. Knowing his background as a magician, a skeptic, a man who made his living as a writer, I eagerly picked up this book.

John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote, "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: 'It might have been!' " This might have been a good book. It SHOULD have been a good book. But it's not. It's terrible. It's not an autobiography, but a series of rambling anecdotes, most of which are about other people. Gardner will write, "I met so-and-so", and then spend a number of pages talking about that guy's penchant for practical jokes. Then it's "And I also met X" and go on about the next guy's life. Worse, the book is filled with "I'll talk about that in another chapter" and "I write about that in [name of another book Gardner wrote]."

Are there no editors? Are there no grammarians? Gardner is allowed to get away with such sentences as "If you see his name on a technical paper with Fan Chung, Fan is his wife." (If you don't see his name on a technical paper with her, she's not his wife?) And, "As I type, I was ninety-five on October 21, 2009."

I'm reviewing this book to warn people off. It's a sad end to a writing life.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsGreat book

I have been a Gardner since1967. This is the perfect book to get to know Martin Gardner.

Published 9 days ago by Daniel Atlan
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Great read.

Published 20 months ago by gino
3.0 out of 5 starsEnjoyable but not satisfying

Interesting man, but I found his constant suggestions to read another of his books or articles to learn more about his thoughts on a topic to be annoying. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Peter Faur
5.0 out of 5 starsthis is a summary of a wonderful life

I admire many people but if there is one person whose life I really envy, it is Mr. Gardner. He seems to have read everything worth reading with attention and care.

Published 21 months ago by yeoman
4.0 out of 5 starsBest for ardent fans

Perhaps, since I've not read any other Gardner books, I'm a poor judge. But I am a magician and so much of this book resonated with me. Read more

Published on March 18, 2014 by KWeber
1.0 out of 5 starsDisappointing

Given as a gift to a mathematician well-acquainted with Gardner's work, I was disappointed to learn that he found the book tedious, over-written, a bore. Read more

Published on March 12, 2014 by Eleanor Sterling
5.0 out of 5 starsMartin Gardner

Martin Gardner had one of the livliest minds of the 20th century. He was endlessly curious and generous about sharing the results of his explorations with the rest of us. Read more

Published on March 10, 2014 by Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 starsDisappointed in Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner admitted that his book is rather disorganized, and I agree. I bought the book to read and then to give to my brother. Read more

Published on March 3, 2014 by Catherine Vivio
4.0 out of 5 starsmostly amusing but perhaps too much name dropping

Headline says it all. But he did cross paths with a lot of interesting people and the account of how he came to write the Mathematical Games articles in Scientific American is... Read more

Published on February 18, 2014 by Jim Dowling
5.0 out of 5 starsI highly recommend it.

Excellent book by one of the greatest puzzle masters of this century. His life and works are most fascinating,

and should be of extreme interest to the general... Read more

Published on February 18, 2014 by Raymond Smullyan

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