Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Popular culture

PSEUDOSCIENCE

Nate Pedersen Lydia Kang

An Amusing History of Crackpot Ideas and Why We Love Them

A rollicking visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science.

The Bermuda Triangle. Personality tests. Ghost hunting. Crop circles. Mayan Doomsday. What do all these have in common? None can quite live up the rigor of actual facts or science and yet they all attract passionate supporters anyway. Divided into broad sections covering the easily disproved to the wildly speculative to wishful thinking and of course hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science - it's a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person's future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It's a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn't. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain't, but it can be explained scientifically. From the authors of Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned scienceone that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in a few things we know aren't true. Lydia Kang, MD, is a practicing internal medicine physician and author of young adult fiction and adult fiction. Her YA novels include Control, Catalyst, and the upcoming The November Girl. Her adult fiction debut is entitled A Beautiful Poison. Her nonfiction has been published in JAMA, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Nate Pedersen is a librarian, historian, and freelance journalist with over 400 publications in print and online, including in the Guardian, the Believer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Art of Manliness.

Available products
Book Published 2025-02-18 by Workman

Comments

Physician Kang and journalist Pedersen follow up their 2017 collaboration, Quackery, with a fizzy survey of outlandish theories from throughout history. The authors explain that polygraphs test for fear rather than falsehoods, and that the apocalypse many believed would happen in December 2012 was based on a superficial understanding of the Mayan calendar's cyclical ages. Offering scientific explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomena, they suggest that the unusual alignment of true and magnetic north in parts of the Bermuda Triangle causes navigational difficulties that have likely contributed to the relatively high number of shipwrecks there. Kang and Pedersen bring dry humor to the proceedings, as when they close out their discussion of "rumpologists" who purport to divine a person's future from the shape of their rear end with the quip: "No word yet on how a surgical Brazilian butt lift might alter your fate." Though the authors debunk bigfoot, crop circles, and ghosts, the most intriguing chapters discuss more baroque theories, such as 20th-century Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger's contention, derived exclusively from dreams, that much of the universe was created after a "waterlogged star" crashed into the sun and sprayed ice blocks deep into space, where they gave rise to countless solar systems. A wry takedown of bogus beliefs, this entertains.

Russian: Livebook Publishing