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The New Age
Not since his 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 Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, Gardner confronts new trends in pseudoscience and the 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.
In The New Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, Gardner confronts new trends in pseudoscience and the 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.
273 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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71 people want to read
About the author
Martin Gardner
499 books512 followersMartin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 26, 2007
This book is a collection of the author’s columns written for both Skeptical Inquirer and several other publications. Though published nearly 20 years ago, many of the topics Gardner discusses are still highly relevant in current times. His essays range over subjects including televangelism to UFOlogy. I found his discussion on the widespread fraud perpetuated by famous psychics and the persistent gullibility of paranormal researchers to be particularly informative. Though not specifically just about the New Age, his insightful commentary on spiritual con artists of all stripes would be educational for anyone interested in the ease with which human belief can be manipulated.
July 15, 2020
Recopilación de columnas del autor en el Skeptical Inquirer, y continuación de La ciencia: lo bueno, lo malo y lo falso. En los artículos el autor comenta libros y acontecimientos relacionados con todas las calañas y catervas de las pseudociencias: parapsicología, psicocinesis, telequinesia... Así como en el anterior libro el prota absoluto de las crucifixiones era Uri Geller, ese farsante, en esta entrega parece llevarse la copa a la tarada del año la ínclita Shirley McLane, a la que dedica tres columnas.
EL libro requiere documentarse previamente en todas las locuras que desmonta (yo a veces me perdía), pero ayuda mucho haberse leído la anterior parte. Un buen libro.
EL libro requiere documentarse previamente en todas las locuras que desmonta (yo a veces me perdía), pero ayuda mucho haberse leído la anterior parte. Un buen libro.
June 4, 2024
A REPRINTING OF GARDNER’S COLUMNS, AND OTHER PIECES
Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was an American popular science writer, who wrote a column in Scientific American for twenty-five years; he was also one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
He wrote in the Preface to this 1991 book, “My first column in the ‘Skeptical Inquirer,’ a … quarterly devoted to reporting and debunking fringe science, was in the Summer 1983 issue. I have been writing the column ever since… Part 1 of this anthology is a reprinting in chronological order of my first nineteen columns… Part 2 consists of fourteen articles and book reviews about pseudoscience that appeared in various magazines.”
Of Shirley MacLaine, he states, “My mind did a double-take when I encountered [John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart] on page 219 of Shirley MacLaine’s third bestseller, ‘Out on a Limb.’… She quotes a long passage from his book ‘Human Immortality and Preexistence’ and calls him the greatest of this century’s philosophers who believed in reincarnation. Miss MacLaine’s citations of other famous believers are curious. They include names of many who had no interest in reincarnation in the sense of cycles of lives on earth—Aristotle, Kant, Carlyle, Milton, Benjamin Franklin, to name a few… John Dewey, a hard-nosed secular humanist and foe of all metaphysics, would have been dumbfounded to find himself listen among those great minds who ‘deeply believed in metaphysical dimensions that would ultimately explain the mystery of life.’” (Pg. 33-34)
He points out, “The most sensational claims of Delphi Associates, loudly trumpeted … on the Phil Donahue and the Merv Griffin television shows, have been in predicting the silver futures market… One forecast was so accurate, the authors write, that the odds of its being chance are 250,000 to 1. With successes like this, why is Delphi seeking funding?” (Pg. 51)
Hs says of creationist George McCready Price, “Although Price is a name unfamiliar now to the general public, it is his work that underpins the writings of the country’s top creationist, Henry M. Morris… ‘The Genesis Flood,’ which he coauthored with John Whitcomb Jr., is by all odds the most significant attack on evolution to have been published since the Scopes trial of 1925. You will have to search hard through this 518-page tome to find a Price-less idea. The arguments are all from Price, even some of the book’s pictures, yet Price is scarcely mentioned except in passing. Why? The reason is easy to understand. Price was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. Morris is a Southern Baptist. Today’s fundamentalist leaders… do not like to give credit for their arguments against evolution to a member of a sect that teaches doctrines they consider false.” (Pg. 94)
He trumpets, “An amazing thing happened in 1986. The creationists actually abandoned one of their favorite arguments. For some 40 years creationists made a big thing about a riverbed in Glen Rose, Texas, where dinosaur tracks appear alongside what seem to be human footprints… In 1986 Glen Kuban, a biology student who is also a creationist, began to have doubts about the human prints. After a careful investigation, he found strong evidence that they were made by a bipedal dinosaur that walked on its heel and toe, leaving toeless prints that resembled human footprints… The big surprise was that [ICR creationist] John Morris capitulated. He agreed that the creationist interpretation of the prints had become too shaky to defend. The Institute for Creation Research, where John is a professor of geology, withdrew his book [Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs] from circulation, and also its movie on the topic.” (Pg. 97-98)
He asserts, “Many worthless books by writers who call themselves parapsychologists have been published in recent years, but ‘Psychokinesis’ … by John Randall, a biology teacher at Coventry School, tops them all. It is not just that he takes over stale ground but that his book is hopelessly out of date. Consider, for example, his enthusiastic endorsement of … Uri Geller, the Israeli magician turned flimflam artist. Randall makes much of John Taylor’s high praise of Geller… in Taylor’s book ‘Superminds’… He never informs his readers that in 1980 Taylor wrote a book called ‘Science and the Supernatural,’ in which he repudiated his earlier book and denounced all psychic metal-bending as fraud.” (Pg. 179)
He recounts, “Miss MacLaine has her first session with channeler Kevin Ryerson… [He] goes into a trance. John, a contemporary of Jesus, takes over. He speaks English, not Aramaic… ‘Ye are co-creator with God,’ he tells a wide-eyes Shirley, reminding her of the time on the beach when she shouted, ‘I am God!’ MacLaine is floored by this revelation. How could John possibly know? It never occurs to her that, since Kevin is acquainted with many of her friends, he easily would have obtained this information.” (Pg. 191)
He says of Oral Roberts, “At 17 he collapsed on a high school basketball court… Local doctors told him his lungs were in the ‘final stages’ of tuberculosis… Soon thereafter, when a traveling evangelist touched his head, there was a blinding flash of light, and Oral leaped to his feet shouting, ‘I am healed!’ … one of Oral’s numerous autobiographies reproduces medical documents proving that a few months later his lungs were perfect, but there is no shred of evidence that he ever had TB. There is only his memory of what some country doctors told him.” (Pg. 226-227)
As usual with Gardner, he relies (perhaps excessively) on ‘ad hominem’ arguments; nevertheless, this book will be of great interest to those of a skeptical mindset.
Martin Gardner (1914-2010) was an American popular science writer, who wrote a column in Scientific American for twenty-five years; he was also one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP).
He wrote in the Preface to this 1991 book, “My first column in the ‘Skeptical Inquirer,’ a … quarterly devoted to reporting and debunking fringe science, was in the Summer 1983 issue. I have been writing the column ever since… Part 1 of this anthology is a reprinting in chronological order of my first nineteen columns… Part 2 consists of fourteen articles and book reviews about pseudoscience that appeared in various magazines.”
Of Shirley MacLaine, he states, “My mind did a double-take when I encountered [John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart] on page 219 of Shirley MacLaine’s third bestseller, ‘Out on a Limb.’… She quotes a long passage from his book ‘Human Immortality and Preexistence’ and calls him the greatest of this century’s philosophers who believed in reincarnation. Miss MacLaine’s citations of other famous believers are curious. They include names of many who had no interest in reincarnation in the sense of cycles of lives on earth—Aristotle, Kant, Carlyle, Milton, Benjamin Franklin, to name a few… John Dewey, a hard-nosed secular humanist and foe of all metaphysics, would have been dumbfounded to find himself listen among those great minds who ‘deeply believed in metaphysical dimensions that would ultimately explain the mystery of life.’” (Pg. 33-34)
He points out, “The most sensational claims of Delphi Associates, loudly trumpeted … on the Phil Donahue and the Merv Griffin television shows, have been in predicting the silver futures market… One forecast was so accurate, the authors write, that the odds of its being chance are 250,000 to 1. With successes like this, why is Delphi seeking funding?” (Pg. 51)
Hs says of creationist George McCready Price, “Although Price is a name unfamiliar now to the general public, it is his work that underpins the writings of the country’s top creationist, Henry M. Morris… ‘The Genesis Flood,’ which he coauthored with John Whitcomb Jr., is by all odds the most significant attack on evolution to have been published since the Scopes trial of 1925. You will have to search hard through this 518-page tome to find a Price-less idea. The arguments are all from Price, even some of the book’s pictures, yet Price is scarcely mentioned except in passing. Why? The reason is easy to understand. Price was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist. Morris is a Southern Baptist. Today’s fundamentalist leaders… do not like to give credit for their arguments against evolution to a member of a sect that teaches doctrines they consider false.” (Pg. 94)
He trumpets, “An amazing thing happened in 1986. The creationists actually abandoned one of their favorite arguments. For some 40 years creationists made a big thing about a riverbed in Glen Rose, Texas, where dinosaur tracks appear alongside what seem to be human footprints… In 1986 Glen Kuban, a biology student who is also a creationist, began to have doubts about the human prints. After a careful investigation, he found strong evidence that they were made by a bipedal dinosaur that walked on its heel and toe, leaving toeless prints that resembled human footprints… The big surprise was that [ICR creationist] John Morris capitulated. He agreed that the creationist interpretation of the prints had become too shaky to defend. The Institute for Creation Research, where John is a professor of geology, withdrew his book [Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs] from circulation, and also its movie on the topic.” (Pg. 97-98)
He asserts, “Many worthless books by writers who call themselves parapsychologists have been published in recent years, but ‘Psychokinesis’ … by John Randall, a biology teacher at Coventry School, tops them all. It is not just that he takes over stale ground but that his book is hopelessly out of date. Consider, for example, his enthusiastic endorsement of … Uri Geller, the Israeli magician turned flimflam artist. Randall makes much of John Taylor’s high praise of Geller… in Taylor’s book ‘Superminds’… He never informs his readers that in 1980 Taylor wrote a book called ‘Science and the Supernatural,’ in which he repudiated his earlier book and denounced all psychic metal-bending as fraud.” (Pg. 179)
He recounts, “Miss MacLaine has her first session with channeler Kevin Ryerson… [He] goes into a trance. John, a contemporary of Jesus, takes over. He speaks English, not Aramaic… ‘Ye are co-creator with God,’ he tells a wide-eyes Shirley, reminding her of the time on the beach when she shouted, ‘I am God!’ MacLaine is floored by this revelation. How could John possibly know? It never occurs to her that, since Kevin is acquainted with many of her friends, he easily would have obtained this information.” (Pg. 191)
He says of Oral Roberts, “At 17 he collapsed on a high school basketball court… Local doctors told him his lungs were in the ‘final stages’ of tuberculosis… Soon thereafter, when a traveling evangelist touched his head, there was a blinding flash of light, and Oral leaped to his feet shouting, ‘I am healed!’ … one of Oral’s numerous autobiographies reproduces medical documents proving that a few months later his lungs were perfect, but there is no shred of evidence that he ever had TB. There is only his memory of what some country doctors told him.” (Pg. 226-227)
As usual with Gardner, he relies (perhaps excessively) on ‘ad hominem’ arguments; nevertheless, this book will be of great interest to those of a skeptical mindset.
March 1, 2018
The gold standard for Martin Gardner's skeptical articles, at least for me so far, is FADS AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE, which among its other interesting parts demonstrates just how old and tired so many of the "new age" concepts are (that book was written in the 1950s, and most of the claims Gardner unpacks were quite mature by even then).
THE NEW AGE is more narrow in its scope than FADS AND FALLACIES, as Gardner looks at those peculiar affects of the 1970s and 1980s - parapsychology, channeling, the resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity, and radical sociology of science. Oddly enough, those topics aren't as disparate as one might expect...
If you like skeptical-Gardner, there's more than enough here. He strikes a tone somewhere between amused, disdainful, and outraged, but (unlike the subjects of my recent read, SCIENTIFICAL AMERICANS by Sharon Hill) Gardner's targets are celebrities and "researchers" who have (had) millions of dollars and astonishing popular cachet. Their irresponsibility, or charlatanry, deserves outrage.
Though the perspective on the "new" woo is fun, these chapters (reprinted from earlier articles) can feature quite a bit of recycled material, which is odd since Garder wrote new fore- and afterwords for them, but perhaps unavoidable. In any event it reduces the overall usefulness of the book slightly.
Overall, a fun read, especially if you want assurances that today's resurgence in flat earth bullshit is not unique.
THE NEW AGE is more narrow in its scope than FADS AND FALLACIES, as Gardner looks at those peculiar affects of the 1970s and 1980s - parapsychology, channeling, the resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity, and radical sociology of science. Oddly enough, those topics aren't as disparate as one might expect...
If you like skeptical-Gardner, there's more than enough here. He strikes a tone somewhere between amused, disdainful, and outraged, but (unlike the subjects of my recent read, SCIENTIFICAL AMERICANS by Sharon Hill) Gardner's targets are celebrities and "researchers" who have (had) millions of dollars and astonishing popular cachet. Their irresponsibility, or charlatanry, deserves outrage.
Though the perspective on the "new" woo is fun, these chapters (reprinted from earlier articles) can feature quite a bit of recycled material, which is odd since Garder wrote new fore- and afterwords for them, but perhaps unavoidable. In any event it reduces the overall usefulness of the book slightly.
Overall, a fun read, especially if you want assurances that today's resurgence in flat earth bullshit is not unique.
March 19, 2013
Another classic Gardner. Not as amazing, or dense, as his "Science: Good, Bad, Bogus," but still a welcome addition to the bookshelf. A voracious citer, Gardner's books will often leave you with more authors/books to seek out; this one is no different.
August 30, 2010
Martin Gardner's columns discussing the paranormal, televangelists, UFOs, and so forth. It was shelved at McKay's under New Age religion. Interesting read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews