SKEPTIC BOOK SUGESTIONS \ REVIEWS

Operaider

Muse
Operaider
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Apr 4, 2004
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I’ve been having trouble finding skeptic books, Borders and Barnes & Noble only seem to have pro paranormal books. I’ve had to special order almost all the books I’ve bought. I was wondering if anyone could suggest any good books on skeptics or the paranormal? Here is a list of what I own, please let me know if you have any suggestions. I’m also interested in finding any “How to” style books on paranormal tricks.

Flim Flam!
The Truth About Uri Geller
The Faith Healers
An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
By James Randi

The Skeptic’s Dictionary By Robert Todd Carroll

Why People Believe Weird Things By Michael Shermer

Debunked! By Georges Charpak and Henri Broch

The Psychic Mafia By M. Lamar Keene

The Demon-Haunted World By Carl Sagan

Guidelines for Testing Psychic Claimants By Richard Wiseman PH.D and Robert L. Morris PH.D

Investigating the Paranormal By Joe Nickell

Psychic Detectives By Jenny Randles and Peter Hough

Talking to the Dead By Barbara Weisberg

Sleight of Hand By Edwin Sachs

The Expert at the Card Table: The Classic Treatise on Card Manipulation By S. W. Erdnase
 
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Popular Science) Martin Gardner

Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience Martin Gardner

I'd also recommend those. Amazingly even though they were published maaaany years ago, they're still very much up to date.
 
A really good how to book is "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland.

You can only get it through his website though. Well worth it, but wait until the exchange rate is OK for you! ;)
 
Thank you Ian's Book sounds like it’s exactly what I've been looking for. I just started reading Psychic Mafia and it seems to also give away allot of the psychic trade secrets.
And I'll definitely have to check out the books by Martin Gardner.
 
I'd like to read John Sladek's The New Apocrypha one of these days. Like the Gardner books, it was published a while ago (1974); I wonder if it stands the test of time as well. I heard about it in a Philip K. Dick interview - he told of how Sladek disabused of him of his faith in the I, Ching.
 
I consider Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason (Part I in particular) to be an outstanding skeptical work. I have seen it in only one bookstore, and even then, only Part I included in a collected works of Paine.

Part II is a scathing criticism of particular passages from the Old and New Testaments. Part II is an angry work. Part I, by contrast, is an appeal to reason, and an earnest plea that true religion be founded upon belief in the Almighty, not upon belief in people. In Paine's view, belief in the Almighty should not be founded upon a written work created by men, but upon a scientific endeavor to understand the universe:
It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.
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Although Paine does get a bit windy at times, and some of his sentences are quite long and hard to follow, his analysis is often compelling. Especially valuable, in my view, is his discussion of the phenomena of Mystery, Miracle and Prophesy. "The two first are incompatible with true religion," Paine argues, "and the third ought always to be suspected."
 
For a detailed, critical history of Spiritualism, Frank Podmore's "Modern Spiritualism" is essential (reprinted in 1962 as "Mediums of the 19th Century").

For mediumistic tricks, David Abbott's Behind The Scenes With Mediums, and Hereward Carrington's "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism" are two of the best, most in-depth texts. Keene's book has a very good bibliography which (if I remember correctly) recommends these books, along with a few other good ones.
 
Although not, strictly speaking, a sceptic book I heartily recommend:

A Short History of Nearly Everything

It shows how scientific theories have dovetailed over thousands of years.
And also how scientific research and experimentation happens in the real world, leading us to all the great things we now have the ability to understand and build.

And it's a damn good read.
 
To understand the psychology of belief, and how our brains tend to make logical errors, I'd recommend the following:

Gilovich - How We Know What Isn't So
Reed - The Psychology of Anomalous Experience
Sutherland - Irrationality
Vyse - Believing in Magic
 
Ashles said:
Although not, strictly speaking, a sceptic book I heartily recommend:

A Short History of Nearly Everything

It shows how scientific theories have dovetailed over thousands of years.
And also how scientific research and experimentation happens in the real world, leading us to all the great things we now have the ability to understand and build.

And it's a damn good read.
Click to expand...

finished this book a couple of weeks ago (I also read Bryson's In a Sunburned country about his travels in Australia, highly recommend).

wished I had it a couple of years ago when I started becoming interested in science. Would have been an excellent primer then instead of a refresher course now. But I really like his writing style.
 
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