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Rating: 
Summary: Reading Pleasure
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Reading Pleasure
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A voice of sanity in a crazy world
Review: Most of this book consists of Gardner's columns from CSICOP's magazine Skeptical Inquirer, though it's filled out with similar articles that found homes elsewhere. Overall, Gardner surveys the realm of mysticism and pseudoscience, lingering on paradigmatic exemplars like Uri Geller and Shirley Maclaine. It's moderately entertaining reading for a skeptic (as I am), but I am reminded of Joel Achenbach's comment about reading such things: there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point since you always know what the answer is going to be before you start. Still, in a world filled with silliness and pseudoscience, it's nice to have some voices of sanity, and Gardner's is certainly one of them.
Rating:
Summary: More Martin Gardner gems.
Review: 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."
Rating: 
Summary: Some of the essays would get a 10, others a 5
Review: THE NEW AGE is a collection of a number of columns and essays that Gardner has written over the years, and while it is almost impossible to maintain the highest degree of excellence over some thirty odd pieces, Gardner does a marvelous job. Many of the piece in this collection--especially those dealing with New Ageism, fundamentalism, or individuals operating on the edge of the Occult--would get a 10, while others could receive a rating as low as 5.
What I most appreciate about Gardner is the balanced perspective he brings to his subjects. Unlike many sceptics, Gardner does not succumb to universal and indiscriminate debunking. There are those who are not able to comprehend the difference between being a religous believer, for instance, and espousing Creationism and fundamentalism. Gardner understands the distinction perfectly, however, and never engages in ad hoc attacks on religion when his real target is an irrational right-wing religion. In this I find his work to be much more convincing than such sceptics as Michael Shermer and a bulk of the writers publishing on Prometheus Books. One of the best examples of Gardner's balance is his obvious liking for Shirley MacLaine despite his abhorence of many of her inane preoccupations. So, although there is an inevitable unevenness to the quality of the essays in the book, they overall stand at a very high level.
Gardner reprints many letters written to him in response to the original printing of many of the articles, and I would like to take an opportunity to quibble on one small point, though on something that he mentions several times. In writing of pentecostals, he mentions that they believe that when one is baptised in the Holy Spirit, one gift of the spirit is the ability to speak in "The Unknown Tongue." In my contact with Pentecostals, the stress has been on "other tongues," many of which are known, and some of which are not. There is no one such "unknown tongue." Some pentecostals like to recount anecdotes of supposedly uneducated people speaking in Latin, French, or German even though they have never learned the languages. A small point, but I think it is important to realize that the emphasis with many charismatics is in speaking not "the unknown tongue," but in other tongues than their own.
Rating:
Summary: Outdated and repetitive, but still valuable and solid
Review: 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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