Cheryl Morgenstern

July 16, 2010

ILS 593

Non-Fiction Genre Study

TITLE: Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens our lives

AUTHOR: Michael Specter

PUBLICATION INFORMATION: 2009 Penguin Press (New York) 294 pages

NON-FICTION CATEGORY: Science/Social Science

SUBJECT: Specter explores a wide variety of topics including vaccine safety, organic food safety and nutritional supplements. With each topic, he explains how the general public’s mistrust of science prevents it from reaping the benefits of scientific progress, with tragic results.

NARRATIVE: Specter intersperses story-telling with factual explanations. Specter does not use footnotes or endnotes, but he does list references by chapter at the end of the book.

TYPE: Investigative science journalism.

APPEAL: Denialism will appeal to those who agree that scientific principles are the best way to determine if a drug treatment, food or anything else works. Specter is a science writer, so people who appreciate journalistic non-fiction may enjoy this title. People who delight in the debunking of commonly held beliefs will find Denialism appealing. Even people who have bought into the subjects he criticizes may want to read a different perspective in order to understand the other side’s point of view. The book is meant to educate readers.

SIMILAR TITLES:

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo which explores how the general public untruths in politics, history and the media.

Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan is another book dealing with the public’s mistrust of science

Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom by Peter Huber shows how lawyers take advantage of the average juror’s lack of scientific knowledge

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce discusses the ease with which many Americans will believe completely false, unscientifically proven things, and how science is looked down upon my a large segment of society.

Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert L. Park discusses pseudoscience

The hedgehog, the fox, and the magister's pox : mending the gap between science and the humanities by Stephen J Gould tries to reconcile the differences between science and humanities

REFERENCES

Amazon.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dus-stripbooks-tree&field-keywords=michael+specter&x=0&y=0&ih=10_4_1_0_0_0_2_0_0_1.62_149&fsc=-1

Block, M. . (n.d.). Book bytes. Retrieved from http://www.marylaine.com/bookbyte/real3.html#tech

WorldCat.

Wyatt, N. (2007). The Readers' advisory guide to nonfiction. Chicago: American Libary Association.