The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher - Hardcover

Gardner, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087975432X ISBN 13: 9780879754327

Publisher: Prometheus Books, 1988

Synopsis

Essays discuss Shirley MacLaine's past lives, television evangelists, L. Ron Hubbard, psychic research, Margaret Mead, channeling, UFOs, and prophesy.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Gardner, the creator of Scientific American’s "Mathematical Games" column, which he wrote for more than twenty-five years, is the author of almost one hundred books, including The Annotated Ancient Mariner, Martin Gardner’s Favorite Poetic Parodies, From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley Jr., and Science: Good, Bad and Bogus. For many years he was also a contributing editor to the Skeptical Inquirer.

From Publishers Weekly:

With his hard-nosed approach to investigating the paranormal, Gardner is quick to spot fraud, deception and the bias that can creep into lab results. Bringing together his columns for the journal Skeptical Inquirer and other articles, this compendium targets psychic surgery, Scientology, Uri Geller, mind-over-matter, Freud's dabbling in biorhythms, Margaret Mead's interest in the paranormal. Yet Gardner is often as close-minded, one-sided and selective in presenting evidence as those he attacks. His apparent contempt for the belief in reincarnation mars his send-up of Shirley MacLaine. His wholesale dismissal of physical evidence for UFOs ignores such meticulously documented studies as Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood's Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. Turning to the new physics, he dismisses Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields as nonsense. Gardner ignores the fact that some of today's mainstream science was yesterday's "fringe" science.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 087975432X
• ISBN 13: 9780879754327
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 273