Mount TBR #7

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Natural History of Nonsense - Bergen Evans

Like Martin Gardner’s classic Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, this 1946 book debunks a range of folk beliefs, old wives’ tales, revolting prejudices, and cockamamie ideas held by both the expert and lay members of modern society on topics concerning flora, fauna, race, physiology and a host of other subjects. The organization and content are lucidly written; the tone smart, urbane, witty. Many of these pieces in fact were written for the literate readers of The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker and the sophisticated readers of Vogue and Town and Country. Evans was an English professor at Northwestern and clearly committed to plain writing and logical thinking. “[D]emocracy is essentially anti-authoritarian,” he says, “it not only demands the right but imposes the responsibility of thinking for ourselves.”