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book reviews
Short books about being wrong about somethingreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
Short books about being wrong about somethingreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
You might think the world is full of books teaching us to use words properly, from H. W. Fowler's famously rant-filled A Dictionary of Modern English Usage to Lynne Truss's witty Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Well, Heffer thinks we need another one.
There's a famous meme of a woman screaming while standing next to the words “Your Next.” That's at least amusing, and while Heffer gets a few good sarcastic lines in, he's far too polite to be a true Grammar Nazi. Most of the entries are straightforward explanations about words that are easily confused: ‘flaunt’ vs ‘flout’, ‘principal’ vs ‘principle’; and words that are often misspelled, used incorrectly, or are just redundant: ‘linchpin’, ‘anytime soon.’ Most other books will have most of these, but the hard ones like ‘ambience’ vs ‘ambiance’ or ‘resistor’ vs ‘resister’ and the logic behind them, if any, are overlooked; and we learn little about challenging grammatical issues such as whether to say “didn't used to” or “didn't use to,” as in the sentence “That feller didn't never use to drink so much of that there corn whiskey.” Maybe his advice would be to rephrase it and not to use either one.
Somebody should write a book on all the inconsistencies we have in English. Why, for instance, is an actress a female actor but a fortress is not a female fort—maybe a fort with a cute pony tail?
It's a typical ‘airplane book,’ not really phoned in but also not meant to be the final word, and he's careful not to offend anybody. Unless, that is, your name happens to be Boris Johnson, who gets both barrels.
dec 09, 2024
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Rule number one in writing a book is that you try not to piss off your readers so much they throw your book straight in the trash. In this mean-spirited pop physics book, Sadri Hassani breaks this rule before we get to page one.
He says the embrace of acupuncture, Ayurveda, chakra, Qi, and alternative medicine “paint a dark picture of what our institutions of higher learning will look like by the end of the century.” Despite his claim in the Preface of not attacking any belief system, much of the book is indeed an attack on Eastern mysticism. But a far bigger problem in Hassani's mind is the existence of Republicans.
He says it is “inconceivable” that embryos created by IVF could be considered children (which is sort of related to something some Republicans believe, if you squint hard enough) or that scientists “were cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious” (which doesn't even make sense). He complains about global warming skeptics and hydroxychloroquine and accuses the January 6 “insurrectionists” of being a sign of “uninhibited, extreme, naked science illiteracy.” He writes:
Falsehoods have to be exposed as they can lead to a sick mind; and the destructive power of sick minds believing in in falsehood and alternate reality . . . now is jeeringly on full display in America. . . .
The same force that repels them from science attracts them toward each other. . . . In such a setting, the enemies of the enemy become friends: the hard-core advocates of alternative medicine, meditation, yoga, and yoga-based spirituality unwittingly find an ally in those who believe that all mass shootings are staged by Democrats and gun-control groups to take a way gun owners' guns. [p.4]
The idea that the semi-serious views of his political opponents, whose views he misrepresents, are part of a hidden conspiracy with aging hippies to undermine science is so preposterous that it raises questions about which wacko conspiracy site Hassani is getting this stuff from.
Hassani repeats the claim, long known to be a fabrication, that President Trump advocated injecting bleach as a treatment for Covid. In this 213-page rant, everyone who disagrees with him on any topic—including most of the towering figures in quantum mechanics—is spreading scientific illiteracy.
He accuses the great physicists—Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson, Eugene Wigner, and John Archibald Wheeler—of injecting mysticism into physics. He accuses Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg of “sloppy scholarly research” and holds almost the entire physics community (except himself) responsible for laying the ground for New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra and Oprah pop psychologist Rhonda Byrne, who claimed that wanting something to happen makes it happen.
What on earth does any of this have to do with quantum mechanics? His answer is that the New Age pop-spiritualists and “gun-toting right-wingers” are all part of a “denial of reality and degradation of science.” He seems blind to the fact that the single greatest threat to science is people like himself who politicize science by spreading politically motivated falsehoods in the name of science.
Until now, physics has been immune from politicization. Hassani's goal is to change that. He fails in this task because he destroys his credibility up front by revealing his own lack of respect for the truth.
dec 10, 2024