Pseudoscience

From the authors of Quackery, a visual and narrative history of popular ideas, phenomena, and widely held beliefs disproven by science. 

From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to  straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.

Pseudoscience is a wild mix of history, pop culture, and good old fashioned science–that not just entertains, but sheds a little light on why we all love to believe in things we know aren’t true.

• "A fizzy survey of outlandish theories from throughout history.... Kang and Pedersen bring dry humor to the proceedings, as when they close out their discussion of “rumpologists” who purport to divine a person’s future from the shape of their rear end with the quip: “No word yet on how a surgical Brazilian butt lift might alter your fate.” Though the authors debunk bigfoot, crop circles, and ghosts, the most intriguing chapters discuss more baroque theories, such as 20th-century Austrian engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s contention, derived exclusively from dreams, that much of the universe was created after a “waterlogged star” crashed into the sun and sprayed ice blocks deep into space, where they gave rise to countless solar systems. A wry takedown of bogus beliefs, this entertains."

  Publishers Weekly