A READING LIFE

The honest truth about hokum

By Katherine A. Powers, 12/2/2001

f I were to choose one book to give everyone I know, it would be ''Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud'' by Robert L. Park (Oxford University, paperback, $14.95). As an artifact, it does not look promising: The paper is pulpy and gray, its cover curls up, and the typefaces used for chapter headings have that needless variety and urgency I associate with self-help books. It looks dopey, but inside the book is a miracle of clear thinking, information cogently presented, and motive examined. Park is a professor of physics and director of the Washington office of the American Physical Society. He has a particular interest in the junction of belief and science, the place where wishful thinking is transformed into supposed fact, and where folly and delusion mutate into fraud.

Parts of the book are funny in their illustration of our vast capacity for self-deception. Park's discussion of the basis for homeopathic remedies, for instance, is a simple pleasure to read because most of the money being wasted on these nostrums comes from the pockets of people who have connived at their own fleecing. Even though I never could see how anyone could swallow the given reasons for how homeopathic cures work - the dilutions and prodigious memory of water - it is still useful to read an account of how they positively cannot if we accept the laws of nature. Other parts of the book make illuminating but melancholy reading. Park shows how and why scientific assertions that wouldn't stand up to scrutiny in a college physics class become the basis for public policy. Again and again we see junk science flourishing as its purveyors circumvent scientific scrutiny and head straight to the media, who are interested in stories, not replicating experiments. Cold fusion and the putative link between power lines and cancer are two of the most notorious examples of this.

Then there is that other dolorous form of scientific hokum, the mistaken endeavors that depend on secrecy to flourish, the most egregious example being the Strategic Defense Initiative. When Park wrote this book, that $30 billion caper had been discredited, he must have thought, beyond any hope of recovery. But, no, as we have recently seen, this boondoggle has legs. Still, as depressing as it may be that we are gulled again and again, ''Voodoo Science'' is so brisk with reason, lucid in its scientific explanation, and perceptive in its assessment of human foible that the pleasure and enlightenment it gives outweigh the gloom it instills.

Like James Thurber's aunt, my late sister believed that electricity drains out of empty light bulb sockets, a wasteful, dangerous phenomenon so distressingly characteristic of modern life. Such a belief, more widespread than you might think, is not an urban legend, because it has no plot, but it is the sort of thinking - anxious but savvy - that informs those ever-embroidered stories of mishap and malfeasance that come to us from out of the ether. ''Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends'' by Jan Harold Brunvand (Norton, paperback, $17.95) is an omnium-gatherum of these marvelous accounts as collected by the author for more than two decades. In these pages I came across, to my mortification, more than a couple of tales I had been told and believed - which pretty much wiped that smug look off my face. You mean that drugs are not smuggled into this country in the bodies of dead babies? And Legos hasn't added a plastic homeless person to some of its sets? What is this world not coming to?

''The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture from NPR's `Fresh Air''' by Geoffrey Nunberg (Houghton Mifflin, paperback, $14) is the best book I've read about language in a very long time. Although plenty of things annoy him, Nunberg directs his attention at why language is as it is - and as it was - rather than laying about himself with the sword of righteousness. The 73 pieces are penetrating, witty accounts of our changing sensibility as it is expressed in language. Little things say it all, such as the repeated use of the word ''see'' (as opposed to ''look'') in radio programs for ''angry white guys.'' Theirs is the ''pure syntax of indignation,'' and ''see'' is ''the expression you use when you think that everything has a hidden explanation.'' Nunberg illustrates the historical and political implications of our calling Afghans, as they properly are, Afghanis. He notices, as who hasn't, the replacement of the word ''history'' with ''heritage'' in the names of museums, and shows that far from serving to connect us to the past, the substitution represents our separation from it, and the fabrication of a source of memorabilia.

I kept trying to put this book down, and I kept trying to stop reading from it to anyone who came within earshot. It was impossible. Even such a flaccid subject as what one's favorite word is takes life from Nunberg's pen. What's his? After some entertaining excursion, he plumps for ''lap,'' that evanescent body part that no other language has a name for. This simple fact and all the musings it stirred up of other people's resting their cats on their upper legs while bent at the hip kept me happy for hours.

The sword of righteousness smites with a fearsome blade in ''Junk English'' by Ken Smith (Blast, paperback, $12.95), one of its targets being ''Battlefield Language,'' as it happens. I know I would have loved its idiosyncratic harrumphing when I was young and intolerant, and who hasn't such customers on one's list every year? Smith has no time for persiflage when ''Fat-ass Phrases'' and ''Invisible Diminishers'' are afoot, to say nothing of ''Palsy-Walsy Pitches'' (''Few things are as irritating as a sales pitch cloaked in a lexical mantle of friendship''). Smith's object is to vanquish junk English, which favors appearance over substance, broadness over precision, and loudness above all, and which, to the author's displeasure, has replaced ''hi'' with ''hey.''

H.L. Mencken called the cocktail the greatest of all the contributions of the American way of life to the salvation of mankind. William Grimes's ''Straight Up or on the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail'' (North Point, $20) is a short, engrossing history of the concoction in all its variety. It's a good little book and includes recipes, too, although I cannot imagine actually drinking most of the results except in an emergency.

If you have a bibulous bibliophile on your list, you might want to see if you can get a copy of Bernard De Voto's 1951 classic, ''The Hour,'' which is out of print, but worth any amount of searching to find. And, while we're on the subject, let me recommend ''Drink: A Social History of America'' by Andrew Barr (Carroll & Graf, paperback, $16). Deeply researched and detailed, it makes a real contribution to one's understanding and appreciation of this country - just as a drink or two occasionally does.

Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow@world.std.com.

This story ran on page E3 of the Boston Globe on 12/2/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.