Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries (Hardcover)

He is at his best when on the attack against the New Agers, the superstitious, horoscopes, ESP, magic, channelers, charlatans, Pyramid power and the like. He demonstrates, step by step, the fallacy of their thinking and is just, even fair, in presenting the opposing viewpoint.

The first article from the title of the book sets the tone. In it he discusses how a theoretical flight of fancy (there are as many universes as we can imagine) became, for some, scientific fact despite not one scintilla of evidence. But more than a discussion of the Multiple Universe Theory, it is an examination of the trend of mixing Eastern religious thought with science and producing a mishmash of pseudo-scientific lingo that is as trendy as it is illogical. He takes on many icons - Karl Popper, Hemingway, Bettelheim and Gary Wills - and, like Paul Johnson in his great tome, INTELLECTUALS - finds monsters, egos and irrationality just around the bend.

He tackles various cultural movements, traces their history and their tragic results: Cult leaders, Primal Screaming, psychoanalysis, Facilitated Communication and weird and little known individuals who made a mark at the time. The quality of the essays are uneven and there is this infuriating obsession with fundamentalists of the Protestant persuasion. He takes after them as if they were the Great Evil yet, as far as I know, no fundamentalist has murdered millions in religious wars, conquered nations in the name of God, slaughtered people due to their size or tortured millions "for the Faith". For that, one must point to (respectively) European Christians, Islam, African tribes and Catholicism. THis does not include the tens of millions slaughtered by secular regimes in this century.

All in all, a good book, a quick read and another valuable lesson in the phrase "seeing is not believeing."

Not only are his arguments uninteresting and poorly made, but he does a poor job presenting other arguments. He resorts a lot to paraphrases and in instances throughout the book he presents us with incomplete representations of the arguments that he intends to criticize. For example he essentially reduces Many World Interpretaion (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics (QM) to the following paraphrase: those people believe that there is more than one real universe and that means that there is more than one real you and that's totally crazzy.

I urge you to spend money on something else instead of this book. I actually have not read through the entire thing because after reading the first dozen chapters I decided that the rest of the book was probably as much of an utter waste as the first part. You will not see a good argument here and you will not learn anything about the subjects which Gardner argues.