Martin Gardner is a well-known science writer who for years authored the “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. First published in 1952, this volume is THE classic of skeptical literature. Gardner displays some of the best qualities of a skeptical author: good writing, good research in an area fraught with obscurity, and genuine fascination for pseudoscience and crankery of all kinds. His book is a parade of eccentric people and eccentric theories: hollow and flat Earth, bizarre physics, Lysenkoism, the Bates vision-correction system, Reich’s orgonomy, general semantics, parapsychology, medical quackery (always a fertile field). You’d have to spend years haunting libraries and
writing away for pamphlets to assemble half of the histories and
biographies that Gardner presents here in a thoroughly sane, good-humored style. — Ted Schultz
