cover image Is That a Fact?: Frauds, Quacks, and the Real Science of Everyday Life

Is That a Fact?: Frauds, Quacks, and the Real Science of Everyday Life

Joe Schwarcz. ECW Press (Legato Publishers Group, U.S. dist.; Jaguar Book Group, Canadian dist.), $17.95 trade paper (280p) ISBN 978-1-77041-190-6

Schwarcz (Dr. Joe and What You Didn't Know), director of McGill University's office for science and society, provides the straight dope on a collection of chemical cases that range from fiction to fact. In mostly simple language, he provides good criticism of celebrity pseudoscience, Health Canada's implicit endorsements of homeopathic products as effective, and California's Proposition 65, which would declare bisphenol A (BPA) a reproductive hazard. More attention is focused on homeopathy to more fully skewer it as a practice that cannot be supported by science. Calling out individual scientific claims as "scientifically bankrupt slop," "garbled rhetoric," "unsubstantiated blather," and "nonsense" makes for entertaining reading, but may be less effective in the stated goal of teaching "how to separate sense from nonsense" than describing in a more general fashion how readers may properly apply critical reasoning skills to recognize false claims for themselves. That's something Schwarcz does do in some cases, for example, when contrasting criteria currently used to define risk to human health and the criteria we more rationally should be using, instead. Readers looking for curious light anecdotes about science being used and misused will be satisfied. Agent: Robert Lecker. (May)