Impostors And Imposture, Literary Criticism / American / General, Literature, Parapsychology, Science
This collection of essays by America's foremost polymath delves into some of the many fascinating subjects in which Martin Gardner has had an abiding interest.
Table of Contents
Preface 9
Part One
1 The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins 13
2 Art, Propaganda, and Propaganda Art 29
3 Sidney Sime of Worplesdon 47
4 Order and Surprise 57
5 Mathematics and the Folkways 68
6 Mr. Smith Goes to Tulsa 81
7 Beyond Cultural Relativism 86
8 H. G. Wells: "Premature" Anti-Communist 98
9 Is Nature Ambidextrous? 103
10 The Royal Historian of Oz 115
11 Librarians in Oz 138
12 Why Librarians Dislike Oz 142
13 When You Were a Tadpole and x Was a Fish 147
14 Logic Paradoxes 157
15 Carroll versus Baum 164
16 Santa Claus 169
17 Speak Roughly 173
18 Kickshaws: A Miscellany of Word Play 188
19 Quantum Weirdness 195
20 The Curious Case of Paul Feyerabend 205
21 CSICOP: Who and Why? 211
Part Two
1 Maritain Looks at Jews 219
2 Kafka: Problem and Prayer 221
3 Thomas Wolfe and the Unfound Door 225
4 Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four 228
5 Can God Be Proved? 232
6 A Failed God and the Vital Center 234
7 The Culturology of Leslie White 238
8 Relativity and Truth 243
9 Einstein as Philosopher 245
10 Hans Reichenbach 247
11 The Spoor of Spooks 249
12 Fermat's Last Theorem 251
13 Mathematical Magpie 254
14 Computers and Cybernetics 255
15 Up from Adam 259
16 How About a Little Game? 263
17 Numbers and Their Symbols 266
18 Gregory's Intelligent Eye 269
19 Off to Gloss the Wizard 272
20 Can a Computer Become a Person? 277
21 Lewis Carroll's Semiotics 280
22 The Red Bugaboo 284
23 The Magic of Lewis Carroll 289
24 So-called Books for Children 292
25 The Popperism of Sir Karl 295
26 The Adventures of Stanislaw Ulam 298
27 Updike Going Down 305
28 The First Three Minutes 313
29 The Tao Is Silent 320
30 People Shapers 323
31 The Glory of Everything 326
32 Hello and Goodbye 328
33 Keeping up with Einstein 336
34 How Not to Talk About Mathematics 339
35 Eureka! 352
36 The Bible and God's Numerology 355
37 Life and Rubik's Cube 358
38 Colin Wilson Prowls Again 361
39 The Gribbin Effect 365
40 The Power and the Gory 369
41 The Case Against Creationism 372
42 Eysenck's Folly 375
43 The Sting 378
44 How Well Can Animals Converse? 380
Index 391
