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RANDI'S PRIZE: WHAT SCEPTICS SAY ABOUT THE PARANORMAL, WHY THEY ARE WRONG AND WHY IT MATTERS by Robert McLuhan. London: Troubador, 2010. Pp. 430. $17.99 (paperback), $2.99 (Kindle). ISBN-10: 1848764944. ISBN- 13: 978-1848764941.
Readers of the Journal of Parapsychology will not find very many of the studies and experiments mentioned in Randi's Prize: What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong and Why It Matters unfamiliar, and he does not even attempt to shed any sort of new light on them. As the title suggests, the focus is much more on the skeptics, what they do and why they behave as they do. Examples are taken from séance days to the modern era, from Harry Houdini to James Randi. The title is a little misleading, as one would expect that it would focus on Randi's famous "million dollar challenge" and it really does not. The focus instead is on the actions and psychology of the skeptics.
McLuhan presents himself at the outset as someone who knows very little about scientific parapsychology, someone who more or less accepts the "debunkings" of Randi and others. The viewpoint of the skeptic, which he notes that in general is the viewpoint of mainstream science, seems logical enough. But, as he explains in the introduction, he cannot help but note that apparent instances of psi are not at all rare, and he also finds himself wondering why the debate is, as he puts it, so "shrill," why Richard Dawkins refers to the paranormal as "bunk" and its advocates as "fakes and charlatans," why Randi uses terms like "woo-woo" and considers the study of it "farce and delusion." With this as background, McLuhan is startled when he begins to read the scientific literature of parapsychology; he is startled by the volume of it, by the numbers of incidents and experiments described, and by the level-headed and objective writings of the investigators and researchers themselves, who appear as serious as any other scientists in any other field-in other words, not even close to the descriptions of them presented by writers such as Dawkins and Randi.
Beginning in chapter 1, "Naughty Adolescent Syndrome," he discusses several well-known poltergeist cas- es-after expressing surprise that there is any current interest in such things....