Bad Science
2011 Silver Medal Winner for Humor, from the Independent Publisher’s Awards. Bad Science: A Brief History of Bizarre Misconceptions, Totally Wrong Conclusions, and Incredibly Stupid Theories takes a humorous look at bloodletting, alchemy, quack devices, the worship of meteorites, faked data, secret testing on people, and all kinds of really ridiculous ideas. From the ancient Greeks to the present, the history of science has been fraught with persecution, fraud, and ignorance on a massive scale–but that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh about it!.
Pages: 224 Pages
Writer: Linda Zimmermann
I enjoyed this book way more than I thought I would. It contains a little bit of everything from medicine to evolution. To be honest the first section on bad medicine was maybe my favorite with the second section on dentistry being my second favorite. After that a lot of just started to blend together and to a degree lost some of the unique qualities in each story that I found in the first part of the book. The small chapters makes it easy to pick up for a few minutes or you can plow through many short stories in a relatively short time. This book approach this topic from all angles from the rich drinking poison to the ignorant trying to sell a device that has no purpose.
Overall, I found myself enjoying this book and finding extra time to read it because I wanted to know what the next bad piece of science would be covered. For the most part I did not know about most of the topics covered. The book does seem to get repetitious after a while so that does take away from the book but otherwise it was a good read and one that can be read rather quickly.