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When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That, by Martin Gardner
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Best known as the longtime writer of the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American—which introduced generations of readers to the joys of recreational mathematics—Martin Gardner has for decades pursued a parallel career as a devastatingly effective debunker of what he once famously dubbed “fads and fallacies in the name of science.” It is mainly in this latter role that he is onstage in this collection of choice essays. When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish takes aim at a gallery of amusing targets, ranging from Ann Coulter’s qualifications as an evolutionary biologist to the logical fallacies of precognition and extrasensory perception, from Santa Claus to The Wizard of Oz, from mutilated chessboards to the little-known “one-poem poet” Langdon Smith (the original author of this volume’s title line). The writings assembled here fall naturally into seven broad categories: Science, Bogus Science, Mathematics, Logic, Literature, Religion and Philosophy, and Politics. Under each heading, Gardner displays an awesome level of erudition combined with a wicked sense of humor.
- Sales Rank: #2286047 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Hill and Wang
- Published on: 2009-10-13
- Released on: 2009-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x .88" w x 6.25" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
With more than 70 books to his credit, Gardner remains thoroughly enjoyable to read. This latest is a collection of 24 articles, book reviews and other pieces on subjects like science, bogus science, mathematics, logic, literature, religion and politics. The range demonstrates that Gardner should be well-known for more than his remarkable Mathematical Games column published for 25 years in Scientific American. Gardner is a debunker who begs folks to think critically and carefully, usually doing so himself with wit and wisdom. He takes on Ann Coulter for her pronouncements on intelligent design and those who claim the sinking of the Titanic was foretold by numerous people. He is most personal in the book's longest piece, Why I Am Not an Atheist, in which he explores the nature of belief. His essays on The Wizard of Oz, Santa Claus and the book's eponymous poem on evolution by Langdon Smith are of a different genre than the rest, but no less interesting. Least compelling in such a general collection are the somewhat pedantic mathematical explorations. The collection represents Gardner at his best. (Oct. 21)
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Review
“Smart, witty essays on science and culture.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times “Martin Gardner is indispensable. Here’s the perfect introduction to the range of his obsessions—from Ann Coulter to the Wizard of Oz. With Gardner, the exercise of reason and taste is always a virtuoso performance.” —William Poundstone, bestselling author of 12 books, including the forthcoming Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) “Martin Gardner keeps knocking my socks off. After all these years, I thought I knew his work inside and out, but this latest collection is full of surprises. Alongside some Gardner classics (a celebration of the Fibonacci numbers, a debunking of parapsychology) we are treated to essays on Santa Claus, the sinking of the Titanic, and a ‘one-poem poet’ who turned the evolution of life on earth into a love story.” —Brain Hayes, author of Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions “Another provocative set of debunking essays from Mr. Gardner. Golden oldies, platinum perennials, contemporary cuties—however characterized, the pieces reveal once again the limpidity of his thought and the engagingness of his prose. Good stuff!” —John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and Irreligion “From Ann Coulter to the Anthropic Principle, Martin Gardner is a magician’s magician, opening our minds to the crazy world around us. These essays are fun to read, and have deep roots and pointers to follow if you want to know more.” —Persi Diaconis, Stanford University
About the Author
Martin Gardner is the author of more than seventy books, as well as countless magazine articles and other shorter works. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A little too random...
By mparker
I knew getting this book would be a gamble, and though it wasn't a complete loss, I wouldn't have purchased it again if given a second chance. Gardner does have some useful insights here and there but for the most part I was disappointed. The different sections are just cobbled together and reads like a random collection of newspaper clippings. And there were times were he used a string of very weak arguments to support his views (even those views I agreed with). For example in one such article he criticizes another author for quoting a catholic regarding a particular subject, after which Gardner points out the author is a protestant, and proceeds to penalize the protestant author for quoting a catholic in support of their position, afterwards rhetorically asking whether the author was protestant or catholic? Which is pretty silly. Ultimately it just felt like a lot of intellectual ramblings laced with sophomoric digs on others whose views he disagreed with, with a handful of pearls of wisdom here and there. I appreciate those pearls of wisdom, they just weren't of enough quality and quantity to make up for the rest.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Food for Thought
By J. Hull
I enjoyed this book. as I enjoy most books that make me sit up and think. I recall it being his last collection of essays, so it had some of those last minute topics and wasn't always the same light-hearted tone he was known for, but it is a worthwhile book and one you can pass around to your friends and family. (I hope you have better luck getting loaned books back than I do though!) I just wish our leaders like thought-provoking literature like this. (Or reading at all, for that matter.)
If you haven't read Gardner before, you might want to look a little earlier in his list to start - find something you like already and prepare to like it a lot more after adding Gardner into it. For instance, if you like the Alice books, be prepared to enjoy them a LOT more if you read Gardner's Annotated Alice. (Fair warning: If you DON'T like puzzles or mathematical diversions or scientific commentary, you may want to look somewhere else.)
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Gardner the Great
By Rob Hardy
I was lucky to get to know Martin Gardner's writings when I was a kid. For me, Gardner will always be the guy who wrote the celebrated and long-running (25 years) monthly column "Mathematical Games", found in the back pages of _Scientific American_. It is true that Gardner didn't always confine himself strictly to mere mathematics; his column was the first introduction I got to the pictures of M. C. Escher, for instance. And the columns were not necessarily games, although games like Reversi were often featured. The wide-ranging subjects were not just an introduction to mathematics, broadly defined, but to the oddities and the beauties that mathematics might reveal. They also showed the enormous instructive power of puzzles. The columns are now collected in lots of books, and they will never go out of date. Gardner also annotated the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and went on to annotate "Casey at the Bat" and "The Night Before Christmas". He wrote in different forums about science, hoaxes, literature, skepticism, magic, and religion. He has published over seventy books, and I learn in his latest, _When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations about This and That_ (Hill and Wang), that he is 94 years old, and resides in an assisted living home. And still writing! Thank goodness, he is still writing! His current book is a miscellany, reprints of pieces published in many arenas. "The only thing these scribblings have in common," he writes, "is that I wrote them all." That's good enough for me!
The essays herein cover a lot of territory. There is politics, like a chapter on Ann Coulter. "I never took Ann seriously until I read her fifth book, _Godless: The Church of Liberalism_." Coulter promotes Intelligent Design, which is religious creationism in as best a new scientific guise as it can muster. Coulter says that Christianity fuels everything she writes, so Gardner wants to know what sort of Christian she is, so she could inform us of the background for her insults against scientists. There is a review here of Frank Tipler's book _The Physics of Christianity_, and it is scathing about Tipler's belief that miracles are not supernatural events violating laws of science, but highly improbable natural events performed deliberately by God without such violations. Gardner reports sadly that this absurd book is not a hoax. Gardner is not an atheist; one of his chapters has a title borrowed from a similar one from Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not an Atheist". He believes in God, but is content to confess "... that I have no basis whatever for my belief in God other than a passionate longing that God exists and that I and others will not cease to exist." He also confesses that this is a leap of faith that he understands "as little as I understand the essence of a photon." There are a couple of "Mathematical Games" style chapters, one about the Fibonacci sequence (always fertile ground for recreational math) and one on tiling chessboards with L-shaped tiles. The title of his book comes from the 1895 poem "Evolution", the only poem ever published by Langdon Smith, about whom Gardner knows more than anyone in the world, and knows next to nothing because no one besides him has taken much interest in Smith. "Evolution" is a sweet, comic, romantic poem of 108 lines. It starts:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
And by the time of the last verse, the couple are sitting at Delmonico's and toasting their evolution from amphibians to mammals and to hominids, quite a performance. In the chapter "Why I Am Not a Paranormalist", Gardner excoriates the astrological beliefs of President and Mrs. Reagan and the support of the teaching of creationism by President George W. Bush. A chapter on Isaac Newton reminds us that as great as his writings were on physics and mathematics, he wrote a lot more about alchemy and about his strange religious beliefs, including his opposition to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. "What else might he have discovered," wonders Gardner, "had he not squandered his energy and talents on alchemy and Biblical exegesis!" If you are already a Gardner fan, you don't need to be told to get this book; if you are not yet, here is a perfect introduction to the broad interests and sharp, entertaining writing of a great American original.
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