Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman – 3.5 Stars

So… I am an atheist (waits 30 seconds for those who are turned off by this revelation to close their browsers) but I’m not the classic variety you hear about all the time* who used to be an evangelist but who left their religion for one reason or another and who are now as a result evangelizing for the other side. My dad was an atheist, as was his father before him. You could say that it runs in the family. Now, don’t get me wrong, my parents did take me to church when I was a kid because this is after all America and that’s what you do, but it never stuck and after some wrangling in my early adulthood I just kind of went back to the default position that gods probably don’t exist.

I bring this up because there’s a subset of atheists that, it seems, are so doubtful of the divinity of Jesus** that they find it fashionable to doubt his existence as well. And, in fairness, it’s not an open and shut thing that a lot of Christians would like you to believe, because, well, if you’re an atheist you don’t have that particular requirement for him to exist for your religion to be true. In the end we’re basing our suppositions on the guy based on 1800-2000 year old books, all of which were written at least 20 years and in many cases several decades after the guy’s (supposed) death.

At the same time, though, there’s really not a lot of reason for him *not* to exist. One particular howler I hear a lot (and which is addressed neatly in this book) is this idea that a son of God who resurrects himself in order to wash away the sins of humanity is a recurring religious meme and the Jesus character is just the latest version of it, adapted from Egypt or one of the mystery cults. Well, to those specific points, Osiris is the god that would have been supposedly adapted, and there’s a fair bit of difference between a god of the underworld who is no longer dead but now has to walk among dead people and the Christian imagination of Jesus. And as to the mystery cults such as Mithra, there is a reason they’re called mystery cults and that’s because we don’t actually know much of anything about them. We know that they existed and in some cases we’re aware of locations of temples and such but very, very little was written down that we can compare. Hence the word “mystery”. If the Christians copied this myth from existing groups, they would have copied bits and pieces from several and amalgamated them into one. But there’s a less complicated explanation.

What’s more logical, as Ehrman points out, is that there was a guy named Jesus and he really was crucified by the Romans for being a political agitator. He certainly would not have been the only figure like this hanging around Jerusalem during this period of time. Anyway, this created a huge issue for the new religious sect. There is a specific passage in the OT that if you are hanged from a tree you can’t be the Messiah***. Basically, the Christian community, confronted with this fact, spun it into “um, yeah! He died like this so EVERYONE’S sins can be expunged! It’s not an embarrassing thing! It’s an advantage!”

This also, of course, wouldn’t be the only time that someone used propaganda to turn a fault into a bonus. That being said, if Christianity would have been created from whole cloth, don’t you think that the author would have come up with something more palatable to Jews than crucifixion (which I know isn’t technically hanging but which was definitely thought of as analagous by the people at the time since both involved hanging someone from a bunch of wood)?

The bigger question, I guess, is why is this stuff important? I mean, I don’t particularly care if there was a Jesus or not. The issue I have with Jesus denialists**** is that they by and large exhibit a general lack of understanding of how we have “facts” from ancient history. One thing that’s commonly cited from the “anti “crowd, for example, is the fact that we only have like 3 sources that talk about Jesus in the century after his death. What is left out of this is that there are really only about 2 sources that we have access to that deal with events that took place in Palestine in the 1st century CE (the third source for Jesus is in one of the Pliny’s works (the younger I think) who at one point whinges about those weirdo Christians). We often have very little evidence for anything this far back, and what we do have is very often tainted. That doesn’t mean that we ought to take the default position that nothing existed back then; that would be absurd.

Anyway, Ehrman’s book is highly enjoyable, at least in the opinion of this history nerd, and written with the non-scholar in mind (he has published scholarly works on this subject as well). Non-Christians will appreciate the book because it’s written from the standpoint of a non-believer (Ehrman has his own reasons for falling away from Christianity but they have nothing to do with historicity), while I think Christians, too, will appreciate someone giving “their side” the attention that it deserves (although there’s also no reverence for Christian beliefs in here, so if you’re easily offended, be warned). All in all, it’s not quite a book I’d require folks to read if I were dictator of the world – there are newer historical issues which are much more important in my opinion – but I do think that if you have the time and the subject is at all interesting to you, you should read it.

*Because they are loud, not because they are numerous!

**That’s kind of a red herring; I am as doubtful of his divinity as they are, but that’s the best way that I can put it.

***I don’t remember the OT passage off-hand because I am not a Biblical scholar, but Paul’s letter to the Galatians references this: 3:13 Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.

****This is a pretty apt description, I think, as the percentage of Biblical scholars of the New Testament who think that Jesus didn’t exist is about the same as the percentage of climatologists who don’t think that global warming exists.

Everything Bad Is Good For You, Steven Johnson – 4 stars

As a history buff, you’d probably expect me to be nostalgic. And, okay, I am a bit nostalgic. There are times when I will wistfully remember a crappy pizza joint in a nondescript mall where I used to live and actually catch myself wishing it was still there even though I remember the pizza being bland when I was 10 years old. However, there is a way that I am quite anti-nostalgic, and that’s that I believe – scratch that, I *know* – that we are living in the best period of time that humans have ever been able to live in.

This is a book which, well, agrees with me and that’s why I like it. Essentially, Johnson’s thesis in this book is that not only are we (Americans, although I’m sure this is equally true for folks in other developed countries) demonstrably smarter now than we were 50 years ago, it shows in our literature. A couple of the points that he makes:

• The Flynn Effect, which demonstrates that since the IQ test was invented during the World War II era, collective IQs have climbed every generation, to the point that a person who tested out as average in 1915 would easily fall into the developmentally disabled category in 1995.
• Modern video games. I know lots and lots of people who laugh derisively at “gamers”, as though these are people who do nothing but spend time on things which are neither good for the mind nor the body. Well, those of you who actually play games know that the latter, at least is way not true. A good video game often consists of several hours of severe intellectual frustration followed by a few precious minutes of accomplishment. Don’t believe me? Go google “Crusader Kings II”.
• Modern television. Yeah, I know it has the rep for being all about the lowest common denominator but in this case the reputation does not match the reality. I think that by now anyone with a subscription to HBO knows that there is stuff on TV which, intellectually, would never be able to be put on the air in the 1980s, but lots and lots of mainstream shows fall into this category as well. We’re at a point where a “dumb” action show like Chuck has as much going on in terms of subplots and plot wrinkles as a show lionized during its time for its complexity of plot such as Hill Street Blues.

I loved this book. I considered calling it “skeptical” because of the way it tackles something that is counter to the zeitgeist but I think that in the end the folks who would be attracted to this book do not correlate with those who consider themselves to be skeptical about stuff. I recommend this to practically anyone. Either you’ll inwardly jump for joy or it will pull you, screaming or not, into the modern era.

Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson – 3.5 Stars

Although I am a big fan, generally speaking, of sports in general, I have never really gotten into soccer, or, as the folks in Europe call it, “football”. I’m not sure that these folks realize that football involves overly muscled men who wear shiny pants and very little actual kicking of a ball with the foot, but the point of this blog is not to show how backwards Europeans are, it is to review books. So I will move on.

Most of what I know about soccer, in fact, are based on three things:

• Like every other American child, I played it for a couple of years when I was somewhere around 8 years old and associate it with orange slices and containers of Capri Sun fruit drink.
• There is a local team called the Seattle Sounders that the city has rallied around after our semi-beloved Seattle Supersonics basketball team was torn away from us.
• The video game Football Manager.

Sadly, I think that the vast majority of my knowledge of the game comes from that last bit of the three. I have attempted to follow the English Premier League in the past, taking as my rooting passion a club called Fulham which plays in a very posh part of London and who to be honest is not all that good.* Like pretty much everyone else in England they run a 4-4-2…

…and here’s where we get to the actual book review part of this review. What the heck is the 4-4-2, you ask? Well, the quick answer is that it’s a very commonly used formation, but for the hows and whys of it, Inverting the Pyramid is a great introduction to this aspect of the game. It goes through how football originally started with people running the 2-3-5, then the W-M, then a number of different tactics, some of which are still used. Do you ever flip to the FOX Soccer Channel, hear an announcer discuss “sweepers” or the “trequartista”, and then flip away lest your relative lack of sports knowledge be exposed? Well, this book will help with that.

The cool thing about soccer is that it is really, really easy to understand on a basic level, far easier, for instance, than baseball or American football. Really, the only basic aspect of the game that’s at all tough to figure out is the offsides rule (which, by the by, is explained in Pyramid, as well as why it exists and how it has changed over the years). That being said, there’s also a tremendous amount of strategy involved, and this book should help you access it.

In the end, if you’re a fan of history like I am, this might just be the best book out there to get you into the world of soccer. It’s far from dry and it also speaks to what is perhaps the coolest aspect of the sport, which is its international nature. It may have started out as an English sport but it’s quickly spread out all over the world to the point that England itself is now only one of many contenders for the World Cup. You’ll see in here just exactly how countries as disparate as Argentina, Holland, and Italy put their own unique stamp on the game. And by the end of it, you just might want to go out and buy some tickets for your local club.

*My highly astute reasoning: they play in a stadium called Craven Cottage which is, well, my last name. Not the “Cottage” part.

Skeptical Saturday! Quirkology by Richard Wiseman – 3.5 Stars

Not all skeptical books have to be about meaty, serious topics of seriousness, right? Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor in England, likes to conduct all kinds of weird experiments which on the face of them make little to no sense but, once you dig a little bit deeper, fill you with awesome. This book is, in essence, a collection of the results of these studies.

Probably the part of this book which you might have heard about before is the bit where he conducted an international test to figure out what is the greatest joke in the world.* The results of this were made into a one-hour documentary on the Discovery Channel featuring Wiseman and comedian Lewis Black. Black really took the piss out of the methodology here and how you could even discern such a thing. In fairness to Wiseman, he was kind of aware of this from the beginning and was also well aware that the “world’s funniest joke” was a real stinker.** The point here wasn’t even so much that the study would be meaningful but, really, that such a study could be done in the first place.

A few of the other things Wiseman looks at:

• Are there really more more marine biologists named Dr. Fish than you’d expect there to be by random chance? (quick answer: yes, as the psychologist Wiseman can tell you)
• What’s the best kind of pick-up line to use at a bar?
• Do people in love have a skewed sense of time? (Wiseman has a really… interesting way of figuring this out)
• If you pump subsonic noise into a classical music concert, will it, like, totally freak the audience out, maaaaan?

Wiseman is best known to the skeptical community for debunking Rupert Sheldrake’s suggestion that dogs psychically anticipate when their masters are about to return home. A lot of skeptics, myself included, don’t particularly care for the term “debunk”, as it implies that our minds are made up about the subject beforehand. It was possible, after all, granted only just barely possible, that dogs have heretofore unknown psychic powers. In any case, Wiseman’s study, in spite of what Sheldrake said about it, was pretty conclusive. It also puts Wiseman in a fairly strange situation, as his willingness to engage with folks like Sheldrake provides folks with fringe-y beliefs access to actual science (most scientists would not give this kind of thing a second thought) but on the other hand the fact that he follows the rigors of science even when it forces him to come to the conclusion that these peoples’ beliefs are false causes those people to lump him in as part of a grand anti-woo conspiracy. Where folks like this ought to be praising Wiseman for bothering to pay attention to him, they heap scorn on him that dismissive scientists don’t get.

Wiseman has another book that came out recently which is much more strongly skeptic-related, although it has still yet to find an American publisher. This is slightly disconcerting, but admittedly quite a bit less so than a decade ago. After all, nowadays he can just post it on Kindle and cut out the middleman entirely. I highly recommend all of his books, but especially this one. It’s quirky, it’s sciencey, and it’s a lot of fun.

*No, the answer is not “our last President.**

**Syndicated columnist and Mister Language Guy Dave Barry almost succeeded in trolling this whole thing, by the by, by encouraging his readers to vote in this study for his own joke, a joke which, as you might have expected if you know anything about Barry, included prominent use of the word “weasel”.

***BLOOOOOOOOOOOOPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER

In Retrospect by Robert McNamara – 3.5 Stars

I am generally not a huge fan of autobiographies but then, few biographies are quite like this. Robert McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ and oversaw much of the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam as it moved from a situation where we were sending “advisors” to a bad but relatively stable dictator to a full-blown war between the USA and Ho Chi Minh. As such, he’s probably one of the most polarizing figures of the 20th century that nobody has heard of.

You would sort of expect a book like this to be self-serving, which to be honest is pretty much the problem I have with autobiographies in general.* There is a little bit of this, but more than anything else this book is something like a 300-page mea culpa for the Vietnam War. The name of the book is telling, as there are many points in which he flat-out states that they went into things for reasons X, Y, and Z but “in retrospect” he would have chosen moderation or another course of action altogether.

It’s not always a particularly fun read – if you are a fan of the US of A at all, you’ll cringe at all the missed opportunities as well as the seeming resignation McNamara applies to the situation around, for instance, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and subsequent coup. At the same time, it’s necessary reading in the Santayanan sense**; I think we’ve already relived the lessons we should have learned with Diem several times over in conflicts since this time. He’s also very candid about the utter lack of knowledge of the reason by his people at the time, although I think he may be overplaying the effects of McCarthyism on this and underplaying his own inability to go out and find people knowledgeable about Southeast Asia.

There is something of a companion documentary that came out at roughly the same time of this book called Fog of War which I also feel I ought to recommend. In fact, I think Fog is worth watching on its own just for the non-Vietnam parts. For instance, JFK’s cabinet was convinced that Castro didn’t actually have nukes and were all ready to “call his bluff” during the Cuban Missile Crisis (as we know now, Kruschev had in fact gotten some nuclear missiles over there).

There’s one interesting footnote here in that McNamara notes that when JFK was elected, one gift he sent to all the members of his cabinet was Barbara Tuchmann’s The Guns of August, a book which I will undoubtedly be reviewing in this space some time in the future. McNamara, I am sure, thinks that a major part of his and the administration as whole’s failing was their inability to learn the lessons of that book either. In turn, I’d be really, really happy if I learned that President Obama gave his cabinet a copy of In Retrospect.

*For instance, I would like to point you to Iaccoca. No, wait. I would like to point you far, far away from Iaccoca.

**”He who fails to learn history is doomed to repeat it.”

SKEPTICAL Saturdays! Bad Science by Ben Goldacre – 3.5 Stars

So… for the time being I think I’m going to do a little of Column A and a little of Column B on Saturdays. That was the monkey rodeo option. AHAHAHAHA I HAVE DEFEATED YOU WITH MY CUNNING AND MONKEY RODEONESS.

Recently I reviewed a couple of other skeptical tomes, Flim-Flam and Why People Believe Weird Things, and one criticism I had (particularly with the former book) was that while the basic ideas inside of the books were solid, the actual case studies were a bit on the outdated side. If you’re new to the skeptic game, you probably want to know what’s out there now that is full of woo, not what was silly and debunked in the 1970s or even the 1990s. Bad Science delivers on that.

This is an English book written by an English guy who writes for an English newspaper, and so at first glance you might think that some of the information therein isn’t quite topical. Sadly, you would be wrong. Homeopathy in particular is a particular thing that is starting to sweep into our own drug stores. I just saw them with my own eyes at the local Bartell Drugs. Sure, they are made of sugar and basically nothing else, so they can’t cause any actual harm. I guess that puts it ahead of wrapping people up in plastic and putting their head in a cardboard box for 9 hours*. That doesn’t mean people should actually be using them, though, and this book does a really nice job of explaining exactly how there’s no possible freaking way they can work, how they in practice don’t actually work, and how astronomically stupid it is to believe that they work.

The other really salient part of this book, at least in my opinion, is the coverage on the anti-vax scare. Just today I overheard a conversation a couple of co-workers were having where they were concerned that one of their kids might have the whooping cough. The good news is, they weren’t, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a concern we ought to be having at all in 2012. Sadly, because a number of people have been misled by people I really have no choice but to call charlatans into thinking that there is a link between vaccinations and autism, we fall below herd immunity in parts of the country and kids get this or other deadly diseases.

If I have any criticism of the book – what keeps it below the coveted 4 stars – it’s that it’s really presented with the person who is already inclined to be skeptical in mind. Okay, that’s not really a criticism, that’s just an angle. The deal is though, these things are such softball subjects for dyed in the wool skeptics that books like Why People Believe Weird Things is probably still a better “first book” for that crowd, and for someone completely new to skepticism, Goldacre’s righteous indignation and ridicule is probably going to turn them off.

Still, it’s a very good second or third book, and there are very good reasons to have books out there to remind the empirically minded that they are not, in fact, completely alone in this world. Goldacre is a smart and witty guy** and this shows through. So long as you aren’t one of the parties being made fun of, you’ll likely enjoy the book.

*Oh, how I wish I had just made this up.

**Smart enough to have been on a couple episodes of QI, in fact***, and to give Stephen Fry a bit of a hard time for not being skeptical enough on top of that.

***In fairness to the fairness, Jeremy Clarkson has also been on tyhat show several times.

Loose Balls by Terry Pluto – 4 stars

What is with my fascination with sports books? I’m a big guy, about 6’2 and currently weighing around 230 pounds, and admittedly that meant that in school I was recruited into sports a bit. Unfortunately for me, I was also pretty fat back then so playing them were not always fun times. I guess I was best suited for football but my fat ass did play on our community center’s high school squad my freshman year. As you might expect, I was and am a really, really bad basketball player. We played full court, of course, so all that running… guh, it makes my shins hurt just thinking about it.

But reading about sports is another matter. There’s something about them that makes the next to impossible seem plausible. I think of Kirk Gibson’s homerun off of Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series. Gibson had a broken leg and may well have been thrown out at first base if he’d done anything but belt the ball out of the park… in game-winning fashion… against a powerhouse Oakland Athletics team which was expected to sweep the whole thing. If that can happen in real life, how is a book about a guy who does something similar so fake?

Anyway, in addition to heroism, sports stories are often pretty awesome because of the utter lack of heroism. Enter Terry Pluto’s excellent Loose Balls, which is more or less an expertly cobbled together set of interviews with former American Basketball Association players, owners, coaches, and front office types about the history of the league. If you’ll recall your basketball history, the ABA lasted from 1968 until 1976, when 4 of its teams merged with the existing NBA. Reading this book, you come to the conclusion that the craziest thing wasn’t that the league didn’t survive, it’s that it lasted for 9 freaking years in the first place. Without giving too much away, here are a couple of highlights:

• In the early years of the league, one team forgot to bring their uniforms to a road game and had to wear T-shirts with the player’s numbers written on the top with Magic Marker.
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was all set to join the league, everyone knew how much money he wanted and the league had pretty much planned his coming, but in the end he went to the NBA instead because the ABA commissioner at the time – no less than the first great center, George Mikan – decided that this would be a good time to lowball the future Hall of Famer.
• There was actually a team in this league called The Spirits of St. Louis. If that isn’t the most awesome name for a sports team ever, I don’t know what is.

Since it is, as stated, more a collection of interviews than a narrative in its own right, you might expect this book to be a bit on the dry side. But no. Thanks to Terry Pluto’s deft touch, the book feels like it’s undergoing a conversation with itself. A person makes a whopper of a remark and the very next line has some other guy saying “oh yeah, that’s totally true” or “no, Bob X is full of crap”. You get this sense that the entire league was run by crooks and con men, but not evil crooks, the good, funny crooks and con men like Bill Veeck* or Charlie Finley**. The players probably got the short end of the stick but at the same time I think a case could be made that the ABA was what brought American pro basketball out from the poorly lit arenas, chest passes, and granny free throw shooting*** era and into the spectacular dunks (the slam dunk contest got its start in the ABA) and star-driven marketing (see: Dr. J) that characterized the league from the 1980s onward.

All in all, this is a very funny book and a good way to pass the time. You may emerge from it wishing to watch a couple episodes of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, but there are worse things that can happen to you as a consequence of reading, I think.

*Oh yeah, TOTALLY going to be reviewing Veeck as in Wreck at some point. He was not actually an owner of an ABA team, though. I’m just putting him out there as the kind of character you expect to see in the league…

**On the other hand, Finley, his mule and all, actually owned a team called the Memphis Tams.

***Side note: Rick Barry, he of the granny free throw, played in the ABA.

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen – 4 stars

One reason why I’ve kind of tried to skew a lot of my early reviews towards “great” books – I mean, aside from the fact that a big part of why I started this blog was to give myself an excuse to expound upon them – is that I’d kind of like you, the reader, to get an idea as to where I’m coming from. That way, when I review something that I think is kind of “meh” but you think is ROCK STAR AWESOME, you can at least peruse my catalog and see what kinds of things *I* really like. Also, it needs to be said that I want folks to read this and be inspired to read other peoples’ work rather than be turned off from it.*

Lies My Teacher Told Me is a fun, quick read, but for me it was much more than that. I sort of liked history in high school. I was bored to tears during that period of my life but the subject was one of those which bored me a bit less at least. As a result it was one of the few subjects that I consistently got good grades in. Well, that hypothesis has some holes in it, as I loved the language arts even more and I got horrible, horrible grades out of those classes.** I found myself reading ahead in the history books on my own and actually – I can’t believe this myself – enjoying some of the lectures my history teachers gave.

But in the end it was still vaguely boring, and there seemed to be something missing. And I don’t mean the “fun factor”. Lies My Teacher Told Me led me to realize what it was: American history in particular, the way that it is told, paints this narrative of a slow but steady march from benightedness (of course, our Founding Fathers are practically lionized as saints but somehow we’ve still moved ever forward since their time) to the utopia that we live in today. Well, as you may have figured out yourself, this is a false narrative. No. It’s a crap narrative. To paraphrase Dr. Stephen Novella, it’s so crap it’s not even false.

History makes SO much more sense when you put all the bits in, you know? For instance, when I went to high school in the early 90s we pretty well glossed over the Reconstruction and the so-called Redemption. There was a little bit of talk of Jim Crow laws but for that whole period we just kind of ignored black people from Homer Plessy to Martin Luther King. Here’s the deal: that’s 70 years of time that went by with nary a word. And stuff happened during that time. For that matter, stuff happened between 1865, when the North had just beaten the crap out of the racist jackholes in the South who used “states’ rights” as an excuse to allow slavery, and 1876, when these people basically overturned the Civil War. It’s important to know this stuff, not just because it’s important to know history for its own sake, but because it allows you to put the current struggles of, for instance, the gay rights movement into much better perspective.

There are lots and lots of other things that Loewen covers in this book. It isn’t just a “real eye opener”, it’s the kind of book that for me anyway completely changed my outlook on the past and, I think it its own way, my outlook on the present and the future as well (as you may have figured out, I’m pretty left of center politically; before I got really into history as a side effect of this book I was pretty far over to the right side of the spectrum). I don’t expect you’ll necessarily be “converted” the way I was, but I do expect that if you felt short-changed in high school, this book will help to explain why.

*Insert long-winded essay about the role of the modern critic here.

**Fun anecdote: I actually flunked freshman English because I didn’t do any homework and my teacher, who I am sure thought he was being nice or something, put as the brief little remarks box next to my ‘F’ grade “A PLEASURE TO HAVE IN CLASS”. Let me tell you something: that discussion you have after your father sees this report card? Suffice it to say that is not the most enjoyable talk we’ve ever had.

Scholastic Saturday: Microeconomics by Colander – 3.5 stars

Is there a cooler discipline right now than economics? Okay, if you answered “yes, John, pretty much every discipline out there” then I can sort of understand. It’s got a reputation for being dry, I’ll agree with that much. Nonetheless, with the recent publication of books like Moneyball and Freakonomics*, it’s starting to find its own niche in the non-fiction bestseller category. And if you want to learn more about it, you would do much, much worse than to find yourself in a class that used this book.

 

That being said, the #1 issue with this book is price. It’s priced at upwards of $100 depending on your school, really right in that “let’s gouge the college kids and their grant money/trust funds” category of price. Ironically, the book obliquely explains that if grants and parents did not exist, this kind of book would be a lot, lot less expensive. See? You can learn about econ just by reading the price alone. THE BOOK IS THAT VALUABLE.

 

Seriously though, the book is very well written. Real-world examples abound, there are all kinds of little text break-outs which provide additional context, and while the book as a whole is not math-heavy (as you’d expect since it’s an intro to micro-econ tome) they do go in and explain the necessary math at the end of several chapters. And through it all the professor who put the thing together maintains a pretty sharp sense of humor about him. I’d kind of like to see him write a pop-science book on econ, actually.

 

I’m not going to lie to you: parts of this book will probably feel like a slog. It’s a textbook after all, a book designed to be a means of gaining understanding rather than entertainment. I do have to say that I read this book as part of an online course and so there was very little out-of-the-book interaction. I could wax on and on about online courses and whether they will ever truly replace the classroom** but I’ll keep this to the work I’m reviewing. The book itself is written well enough that this was not an issue for me. I’m not sure how well that speaks to my instructor but hey, a good book is a good book.

 

I’m not *quite* sure that I’d recommend reading this on its own without the support structure of someone else who is at least out there and available to walk you through some of the harder-to-get bits. I would love to take a class from the writer of this book, though, and reading his book is the closest one can get to that (assuming he doesn’t have a lecture series at The Great Courses.

 

*Both of which will reeeeeally likely make it into these reviews. Watch this space! Or that space.

 

**Quick and dirty verdict: the issue is twofold. One, it’s just a fact that you retain more info when you read something *and* someone steps you through it than if you do either thing alone. It’s all about working to different parts of the brain or something. Also, I’m convinced that the aspect of shuffling off to school, sitting down in a class, pulling out your notebook, and then patiently waiting for the bell to ring places you in the mindset of a person ready to learn. It’s very similar, really, to how for some people putting a suit on in the morning puts them in the mindset of doing Serious Business. Is this a Pavlovian connection? Sure, yes, I’d say so. There’s nothing inherent about the classroom that creates learning that couldn’t be repeated elsewhere. But it’s still a connection that tens of millions of people still make and so it’s pointless right now anyway to pretend that this phenomenon doesn’t exist.

Flim-Flam! by James Randi – 3 Stars

Last week, you will recall, I took a look at Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. This is a very similar book, perhaps a bit heavier on the hows than the whys but all in all covering similar territory. James Randi and Michael Shermer operate in similar circles, after all; while Shermer runs Skeptic magazine, Randi’s “thing” is the James Randi Educational Foundation and he actually writes an article for Shermer’s publication called “Twas Brillig…”. With the recent passing of Martin Gardner, Randi is now recognized as the elder statesman of the skeptical movement.

So all that being said, how worth it is this book, given that the Shermer book exists? I think it’s a lot of fun. In researching this review I found another review on the thing which states, in part, that this stuff is surprisingly undated. I, um, can’t quite agree with that. One of the big ticket items this book tackles is biorhythms. Remember biorhythms? That whole idea that we run in 23, 28, and 33 day cycles and when those cycles cross over each other you can get into accidents and so on? About 90% of what I remember of this phenomenon was from the Nintendo game Bases Loaded. Anyway, if you needed them to be debunked, they’re in here. Also dowsing, Erik von Daniken (of Chariots of the Gods? fame) and a whole host of other things that you probably do not know about unless you are a big fan of re-runs of In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy.

I guess that where these items are not quite dated is that while the substance of the woo-woo that people believe in has changed, the style of the beliefs has not. Back then, there was a distressing number of scientists, many with advanced degrees, pedigrees, and reputations to put on the line, who believed in psychic powers enough to allow themselves to be deceived by charlatans. It sounds harsh, but that’s exactly what it was. Until Randi embarrassed one foundation by planting spoon-bending teenagers into a “psi” experiment (which happened just a couple years after this book), a lot of these people flat-out would not accept that such parlor tricks were influencing their results. Some even went so far as to claim that the negative aura of truth-seekers like Randi were making these men fail in controlled experiments!

Nowadays you don’t see quite the same emphasis on “parapsychology”, although I think a case can be made that now instead we’ve got a whole big load of non-climateologists claiming that global warming is hogwash. That’s a bit of specious link though. A much closer link is the general level of credulity people have towards people who make flat-out bizarre claims. Just this past week the podcast Monster Talk had a self-styled witch on whose primary piece of evidence for supernatural beings, it seemed, was that the people that she spoke to weren’t inclined to lie or make things up. I doubt this aspect of humanity is going away any time soon so we may as well be aware of it.

All in all, though, I think this is a better book now about the history of skepticism than it is about how to be a “proper” skeptic in this day and age. Skepticism is about the process rather than the result, of course, so books like this are always important in their own right, but if you’re looking for a takedown of the anti-vax movement or Bigfoot, this is not the place to find it. Also, Randi is a funny guy and very  good at what he does, but this book is also written from the perspective of a person who has been around “flim flam” for an awful long time and so, to a recently deconverted “New Ager”, his attitude may seem off-putting. If you’re new to skepticism, this probably isn’t the best first book for you, or second book or third book for that matter. It’s a good book to have in your library eventually though.