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Michael Shermer is a prolific writer, best known for The Science of Good & Evil, Why People Believe Weird Things, and, publisher of Skeptic Magazine. I have been a huge fan of Shermer for some years and traveled cross-country twice this year to attend his conferences on the west coast.
The early chapters of The Believing Brain have some redundancy from Shermer's earlier work but the last 60 percent is a wealth of new information that I found enlightening, and partially disturbing. Unlike the vast ...more
The early chapters of The Believing Brain have some redundancy from Shermer's earlier work but the last 60 percent is a wealth of new information that I found enlightening, and partially disturbing. Unlike the vast ...more
Non fiction books are hard to rate sometimes, as the subject matter can be as big a factor as the execution. Still, I've read several of Michael Shermer's books in the past and I generally think he picks some pretty damn interesting topics to talk about, even if he holds to some pretty unpopular worldviews. Through the book, he shares how he went from non religious, to deeply religious, to agnostic/atheist over the course of his life, all while explaining the factors that contributed to his opin
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Excellent book on why our brains have evolved to believe stuff in general without any or little evidence. The first half of the book is the best stuff with his information on the brain. The last half of the book is more about why people believe in their certain ideologies. But all is still worth the read.
It's not that I didn't enjoy this book; it had its entertaining bits and some personal history for Shermer (which, as a long-time Michael Shermer fan, I appreciated), but it was a lot of the same old same old, both within the genre and within Shermer's own literary corpus. There wasn't much in this book that I hadn't read 5 times already in other places. It may seem unfair to hold this book responsible, but Shermer ought to be aware that Carl Sagan already wrote this book several decades ago. If
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Jul 12, 2011
Myron
marked it as to-read
Oct 04, 2011
Karla
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Aug 01, 2012
Payal Banik
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Oct 26, 2012
Anna Johnstone
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Jul 24, 2013
Vero
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Aug 11, 2013
William Weyer
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Sep 27, 2014
Amanda
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Sep 20, 2015
Robert Wilson
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