Skip to main content

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That - Ben Goldacre *****

I was somewhat unnerved when Ben Goldacre's latest arrived in the post. I generally love his work, but this is a positive doorstep of a book at 474 pages, so I recoiled a little - but I shouldn't have worried, because as always it's readable, entertaining and enlightening. I got through the whole thing in two days, admittedly helped by spending six hours reading it on two train journeys, which, as a result, flew by.

What we have a selection of Goldacre's writing on bad science and the like since around 2003 (though it's not particularly chronological, more ordered by topic). A lot of the entries are taken from his Guardian Bad Science column, so if you are a fan of that, some will seem familiar. However there was plenty enough for me that I had not seen before - and even revisiting old favourites brought a smile, rather than a feeling of 'not again.'

Topics include all the usual Goldacre targets: quacks and pseudo-science, badly reported experiments, journalists totally misleading the public about what a scientific paper says and much more. You can enjoy, for instance, him laying into individuals and companies that make outrageous claims, but also highlighting heavy handed litigation to suppress criticism, newspaper headlines like 'Suicides Linked to Mobile Phone Masts' (guess what - they weren't) and even a piece on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway. I particularly liked the article 'The Caveat in Paragraph 19' which pointed out something I'd been aware of for a long time without really quantifying, which was the way bad newspaper science often makes outrageous claims up front, then has someone qualified far into the article - well after many stop reading - saying 'but actually there is no evidence for this.'

I Think You'll Find works well as a dip-in book, but I happily read it end to end. What says it all about the quality of this book is that when I got to page 403 and discovered that the remaining pages were notes and index I was really disappointed. I wanted more, and I rarely like long books. That's not a bad sign. Recommended for all the journalists, politicians, purveyors of woo and scientists in your life - but, frankly, for everyone else too. Lovely stuff.


Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...