The Night Is Large: Collected Essays : 1938-1995

The Night Is Large: Collected Essays : 1938-1995

Amazon.com Review Martin Gardner has a knack for wondering about everything. From Alice in Wonderland to supply-side economics, Gardner has spent a lifetime discovering, pondering, and explaining ideas. His essays, most of which appeared in Scientific American and The New York Review of Books, often tackles the big issues--is there a God?--in a language the rest of us can digest. He has the eye to recognize what most people dont and the voice to articulate what many of us cant. Product Description A definitive anthology of fifty-four incisive essays representing nearly sixty years of work encompasses topics ranging from the mysteries of quantum physics to the question of the existence of God to the paradox of the significance of nothing. From Publishers Weekly The title of Gardners essays, which are drawn from an output of nearly 60 years, comes from Lord Dunsanys The Laughter of the Gods: A man is a small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders. Substitute cosmos for night, and one has the principle behind the contents-a recapitulation, often involving the recycling of already recycled writings, of Gardners polymath productivity. Recreational wisdom, much of it culled from his columns in Scientific American and reviews in the New York Review of Books, emerges in every essay, but not every essay is for every reader. Many are absorbing, some idiosyncratic, others abstruse. His intellectual heroes are from a variety of pursuits and times: Lewis Carroll, Oz creator L. Frank Baum, philosopher William James, fantasist G.K. Chesterton, mathematician Roger Penrose. Gardners doghouse is more crowded and includes educator Robert Hutchins and his Great Books missionary Mortimer Adler, Sigmund Freud for an absence of empirical underpinning, Steven Spielberg for his tooth fairy Close Encounters of the Third Kind, T.S. Eliot for cramped thinking, Arthur Conan Doyle and dozens of other seemingly intelligent souls for succumbing to spiritualism and other pseudosciences and religious orthodoxies. Also unspared are supply-side economists such as Arthur Laffer, and literary cranks promoting alternative authors of Shakespeares plays and grubbing for profundities in Finnegans Wake. My own opinion, he contends, is that the gullibility of the public today makes citizens of the nineteenth century look like hard-nosed skeptics. Essays are prefaced by background data and postscripted by paragraphs, often amusing, on their reception. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Garner is a polymath extraordinaire. In these 47 essays, he writes authoritatively and interestingly?even wittily at times?on a broad spectrum of topics from mathematics (to be expected from the long-time contributor of the Mathematical Games column to Scientific American) to theoretical physics to religion and philosophy, economics, popular literature, and music. In all of his writings, Gardner is the voice of rationality and the opponent of pseudoscience and obscurantism. At the same time, he displays a warm personality and is tolerant of points of view from which he differs. The writing is clear and graceful. Highly recommended for all libraries.?Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., CUNYCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Now 81, Gardner has been interested in conundrums--scientific, philosophical, literary, and otherwise--virtually his entire life. As a regular reviewer in the New York Review of Books, a contributor to Scientific American, and a columnist in the Skeptical Inquirer, he has enthralled readers with curiosities, mathematical games, and fine insights into the workings of man and nature. Jumping from discipline to discipline, Gardner is equally at home discussing puzzles in Joyces Ulysses, time travel in the theories of Einstein and Hawkings, supply-side economics, Arthur Conan Doyles bizarre belief in fairies, free will, and