If you would like to contribute a review to the printed magazine, please email Paul Taylor at reviews at skeptic.org.uk and Jon Wainwright at jon at skeptic.org.uk. If you would like to contribute a book review directly to this section (although many reviews here first appeared in the printed magazine) please email Mark Williams at digest at skeptic.org.uk.
Oxford University Press, £13.99, ISBN 0195313682 Snake Oil Science: the Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine By R. Barker Bausell Reviewed by Ray Ward Bausell covers the rise of CAM, the history of placebos, impediments to valid inferences, why randomised placebo controls are necessary in CAM research, judging scientific evidence, personal research on acupuncture, how […]
Profile Books, £7.99 (pb), ISBN 1846681111 The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers by Michael Blastland and Andrew DilnotReviewed by Michael HuttonOur lives are more and more dominated by an endless flood of numbers: the average cost of this, the increased risk of that, the number of people who have stopped, or […]
OUP, £20.00, ISBN 978-0-19-923920-7 A decade ago, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont published Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science, a book written to provide a context for Sokal’s glorious hoax, whereby he successfully submitted a parody of postmodern theorizing about science to the journal, Social Text. The journal’s editors snapped up what they took […]
Prometheus Books, £17.50 (hb), ISBN-10: 1591025656Another Gardner book is always good news, for both sceptics and aficionados of science and mathematics. Over the last fifty years, he has written nearly a hundred books, especially about mathematical puzzles and diversions. This latest volume is a collection covering a range of his own enthusiasms, which yields a […]
Atlantic Books, £7.99 (pb), ISBN 10: 1843546760This book is an impressive new addition to the now well-established genre of sceptical works critiquing largely irrational ‘fringe’ theories relating to matters of science and history, especially those which (although often absurd) manifest a degree of superficial plausibility for the non-specialist reader and have thus had unwarranted influence […]
Prometheus Books, £12.99 (pb), ISBN-10: 1591025834This book could probably only have been published in America, though it may not be as widely read there as it should be. The obsession of American fundamentalists with eschatology – beliefs about the end of the world – seems as tenacious as ever and Robert Price, a professor of […]
Piatkus, £9.99 (pb), ISBN-10: 0749927607Many non-mainstream thinkers are currently focusing on the now familiar fact that the 5000-year Mayan “Long Count” reaches an endpoint in December 2012. In this book, Pinchbeck presents an unusually complex case for the genuine significance of this crisis. He argues (in the tradition of Capra, etc.) that Mayan ideas about […]
Pocket Essentials, £9.99 (hb), ISBN 978-1-904048-88-6It’s hard to see the purpose of this book, which offers no new insights or information, just a series of potted biographies of people and groups in London, some more occult than others, padded with historical background. Even for a reader with no knowledge of the occult, this would be […]