The New Age - Softcover

Gardner, Martin

3.8

51 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879756446 ISBN 13: 9780879756444

Publisher: Prometheus, 1991

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Not since his Science: Good, Bad and Bogus has there been such a bountiful offering of the delightful combination of drollery and horse sense that has made Martin Gardner the undisputed dean of the critics of pseudoscience.

In The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, Gardner confronts new trends in pseudoscience and the paranormal: from the much-publicized past-life exploits of Shirley MacLaine to the latest in perpetual-motion machines, from "prime-time preachers" to the "channeling mania" of the past few years.

Many of these pieces were published in Gardner's column in the Skeptical Inquirer. Others appeared in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Discover magazine, and other publications. Gardner has added forewords and/or afterwords to most of the chapters to give background, to bring recent developments to light, or to include responses from his critics.

Destined to be a classic of skeptical literature, this book will be a welcome treat for Gardner fans and a rewarding adventure for his new readers.

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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.

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