I’ve recently finished reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. The author has been a champion of common sense and science in his column for the Guardian and his blog. The book is mostly a collection of the stories that have featured in his blog such as Gillian McKeith, MRSA, MMR, homeopathy and so will be familiar to his regular readers.
I am big fan of Goldacre’s work so I don’t want to criticize. But. And fortunately it’s not a big but. But, the book could be improved by tougher editing. There were a number of repetitions of explanation and people mentioned without explanation of who they are. A graph on media stories is labelled media stones. I’ll let that go given the problems with the pics in my book and the fact that it wasn’t as big a howler as the graph in the third part of Marcus du Sautoy’s The Story of Maths on BBC4 last week. Also the penultimate chapter claims that it is the last chapter. These should have been spotted by the author or a diligent editor.
Right. That’s that out of the way. Despite all that it is very good book. It is highly readable and well-argued. Also, he made a point on dumbing down right at the end which I will return to at a later time (hopefully). If you know anyone who is interested in science, particularly the science of medicine, but is not an expert, then this is for them. Arts graduates working in the media should be forced to read it!
