Books in Brief: Flim-Flam!

Flim-Flam! by James Randi (Lippincott/ Crowell, 340 pp., $12.95). One of the hallmarks of the counterculture movement of the late Sixties and the Seventies was the supernatural revival. From ESP to gurus to astrology, anything that went against the grain of Western science and logic was latched onto and uncritically accepted. But cultural dementia can last for only so long, and already the pendulum has begun swinging back toward rationality and sanity. Unlike most prominent foes of unreason (such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan), James Randi is not a professional scientist. He is a magician and escape artist, a line of work which gives him two special advantages. One is his conjurer’s eye: he is trained to look for misdirection, sleight-ofhand, and chicanery and thus can not only spot humbug, but interpret it for the lay reader. The second advantage is a bit more indirect. Since he is an outside researcher, he feels under no professional obligation to be nice to what he sees as academic gullibility and out-andout fraud. Therefore, Flim-Flam! is written in a juicy, knock-’em-down style. Randi takes on the heavies of the paranormal scene—von Däniken, UFOs, Uri Geller, TM—and feeds them into the meat grinder of critical investigation.. One recurring theme in Flim-Flam! is the sloppy quality of most para-normal inquiry. Carelessness and selective interpretation which would be intolerable in other fields of research are all too common in supernatural investigation. As Randi shows (the book is very well documented), the scientific method is often twisted and bent to accommodate the investigatee. Underlying his whole thesis—and explaining his profound distaste for para-normal flummery —is Randi’s excitement about real life. Walking on the moon beats bending spoons any time. “Throw away the Tarot deck and ignore the astrology column,” he writes. “They are products offered you by charlatans who think you are not the marvelous, capable, independent being you are.”