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Customer Reviews of The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher

Reading Pleasure
Martin Gardner's writing is not 'technical writing'... it is science writing for the "recreational reader". This book is highly entertaining, accessable to non-scientists, and a highly informative and important book. To all of the avowed skeptics out there: this is one of those books on the short list of books that you need to give to your unsuspecting "non-skeptic" friends. Even the most devout fluff-head will get too far into it before they get put off by the content. And the book is inexpensive enough to give as a gift to someone you are not especially enthusiastic about giving gifts to.
For the rest of us (skeptics): there is in fact some new material that is not touched in the other classics of the "skeptics bookshelf", therefore this one is a must-have.

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Outdated and repetitive, but still valuable and solid
This collection of essays, gathering articles written for a variety of publications (but mostly for "The Skeptical Inquirer"), covers a number of subjects: creationism, UFOlogy, television evangelists, a few borderline scientific claims, and especially spiritualism and psychic research. Gardner is brilliant, and his writing is compelling, extremely witty, and easy to understand. In many ways, it should be required reading for anyone interested in "fringe" movements, but readers should understand that, as a whole, the book has some shortcomings inherent in these sorts of collections.

Some of the articles in "The New Age" provide convincing refutations of the topic under discussion, while other essays preach to the converted. Occasionally, he hits a bull's-eye: his essay on certain televangelists, written after the revelations about the Bakkers and before Swaggart's fall from grace, provides much information that is incriminating enough to push fence-sitting readers onto the greener side of skepticism. Other articles are valuable purely for historical reasons, such as his survey of perpetual motion machines. All too often, though, it feels like Gardner is shooting ducks in a very small barrel: easy targets, but bordering on the pathetic. One might argue that these articles are necessary because so many people believe in such garbage, but I can't imagine, for example, that his mocking summaries on the preposterous metaphysics expounded by Shirley MacLaine would convince anyone gullible enough to believe her in the first place. His chapters on the actress rarely offer direct refutation of her outlandish claims or point out their many contradictions.

The second deficiency is far more serious. Like many writers who collect their essays, Gardner has opted for reprinting the essays as they were written rather than rewriting them into a coherent and fluid whole. (His concession to the reader is to publish an afterword to each essay that reprints responses and updates information.) The problem with this unenterprising approach is twofold: since many of the essays were written on related or similar topics for disparate audiences, there is a lot of repetition, and the book bounces back and forth among subjects with no sense of direction. As a result, we read no less than four times, in nearly the same prose, about physicist John Taylor's testing of Uri Geller's "spoon-bending" trick, twice about Robert Browning's skepticism towards D. D. Home's seances, and so on. Likewise, instead of one chapter on Shirley MacLaine, we get two (three if you count the chapter on channeling), repeating much of the same information and placed in different parts of the book.

The final problem with the book is no fault of Gardner's: many of the essays are simply outdated--particularly those on borderline physics (such as superstring theory and the unsupported claims of Thomas Gold and Halton C. Arp, whose fifteen minutes are pretty much up). In fact, in 1996 Gardner published a sequel, "Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic," which I'm now eager to read.

Even though I've highlighted the negative aspects of this work, Gardner's analysis is trenchant and authoritative. Reading these essays made me realize that we need a "debunker's almanac"--an annual collection keeping up with the latest scams. In the meantime, I've ordered a subscription to "The Skeptical Inquirer."

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More Martin Gardner gems.
The material in this volume consists of essays from various periodicals, among them the Skeptical Inquirer, Nature, Discover, et al. It's a more mature work than Gardner's seminal opus, "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (which I do recommend as an overall summary of the nonsense that gets MORE rather than less popular).

Mr. Gardner, I now designate you as my second favorite author, next only to Arthur C. Clarke.

Like, say, James Randi, Gardner pokes fun at various fads, most of them known as "New Age." I must say I was a little confused that the text was broken into two sections both of them entitled "The New Age." That must have been a minor editor's error and, at worst, wastes a couple of pages of paper.

The most amusing character covered at some length in the text is Shirley MacLaine. A friend of mine passes from one New Age fad to the next but he doesn't hold a candle to Shirl who communicates with the dead, the gurus from millenia ago and God knows who else. In the text to which I referred above, Gardner covers L. Ron Hubbard when he was still limited to "dianetics," before that "movement" became a religion. In this volume, he confesses that long ago he just felt Hubbard to be a b-grade sci-fi writer with delusions of literary and spiritual authority. Now he finds L. Ron a pathological liar without any moral merit to speak of; that's what happened when Gardner learned more from two biographies of that founder of Scientology.

Oh, then there's J. Z. Knight who has been responsible for a real estate boom in the Pacific northwest where her disciples are flocking to get wisdom from 35,000 years ago. And the relatively short chapter on "Prime Time Preachers" was a real education to me who remembers Oral Roberts from the early 1950s!

Anyway, many other personalties and fads are reviewed here and it would take pages to mention them all. Like Randi's "Flim Flam," I recommend this as a general overview of silly fads most of them categorized as "New Age."