Customer Reviews
Please read the negative reviews - they say it all - By: Houston, 03 Jan 2009 
Finally someone has taken the time to offer a widely available & robust rebuttal to the nonsense on offer from the organic movement, homeopaths, anti-GM NGOs etc. Traverne does a wonderful job of explaining the role of sciencein society & how without a clear & consistent framework, reliant upon repeatability & peer review, then we would have no way of determining truth from 'whatever the snake-oil salesman says'. Previously, I had never considered how fundamental the concept of truth & the process for determining fact from 'intuition' was to supporting freedom & democracy - the author labours this point a touch, but it is well made.
This is a superb book.
Not scientific or truthful - By: S. Moore-Bridger, 13 Nov 2008 
Mr Taverne, who many years ago might be experienced as a freedom -loving democratic socialist ,has tried to find the paradigm behind the ecological & environmental movements of today. In an extraordinarily interesting part of his book he tries to find thisin the person of Rudolf Steiner(1861-1925) founder of biodynamic agriculture anthroposophical medecine & steiner education, whose london centre isin Park Rd NW1.This seems to me unusual, since Steiners work seems not very well knownin Britain except superficially. BUT......
Far from Steiner being unscientific or inclined to vague anti -scientific notions ( which may indeed infect some of the enthusiasts Taverne lambasts) he wasin every way extremely scientificin the true sense; even writing books on epistemology & later extending the scientific sense to the spiritual world as well as that of the senses.
Taverne may not know this or doubt it & feel justifiedin lumping Steiner with what he considers unscientific dreaming;, even he may consider him the source of it .I strongly disagree but he is entitled to his opinion.He even can imply that some Nazis were given to this sort of enthusiasm & unscientific ideas.
But it is really a terrible slur to imply thatin some way Anthroposophy is the source of Nazism. almost like blaming Lincoln for the death of John Wilkes Booth . ( I cannot quite find a good analogy) In other words anthroposophy is TOTALY OPPOSED to racism & the idea of "racial thought." In fact it proclaims free thought which comes from the individual spirit & is not tied to race business war or ambition. Unlike some other examples.....
When Mr Taverne links Steiner to the vague elementsin the Green aganda , we may demur ; but when he states baldly twice that steiner was a member of the NSDAP we arein the realms either of repetition by heresay of utterly inaccurate information ; & therefore unscientific negligence of a high order ; or of a deliberate lie intended to mislead & confuse a public with interestin these matters. Only Mr Taverne can tell us which.
Read with Caution - By: K. Gibson, 31 Oct 2008 If you intend to buy this book then do so with extreme caution. Margaret Cookin her reviewin The Guardian observed that much of Taverne's `discussion is rather rant than reason' & pointed to his tendency to declare as absurd any argument he doesn't understand. But more worrying are his gross distortions of history & his total misrepresentation of those individuals involvedin the ecological & organic movementsin the twentieth century. His attacks, for example, on Rudolf Steiner & the Anthroposophical Movement are a total fabrication & a complete falsification of the facts. Taverne, relies on Anna Bramwell's book Ecologyin the 20th Century: A History, to argue that Steiner was a member of the Nazi partyin it early days. This is completely untrue & although some of the Nazi leaders were interestedin the agricultural methods developed by Steiner, he never embraced any right wing ideology nor joined any political parties. Indeed he was frequently attacked by right wing extremists & at one pointin the early 1920s he was forced to call off his lecture toursin fear of his life from right wing groups. Taverne uses no primary source material to support any of his argumentsin this book & one can only say that if you decide to buy it then it is a good lesson on how history should NOT be written.
Dr. Kenneth Gibson
Polemical Nonsense - By: Mr. Peter C. N. Tangney, 07 Jul 2008 "The March of Unreason" is an ill-conceived, narrow-minded, badly-argued polemic disguised by just enough rationality to convince those with no understanding of the issues, that anyone with political leanings left of centre, or anyone involvedin a green NGO suffers from relativist myopia, & refuses to recognise objective science.
I have two main issues with the book. I basically agree with 80% of what he says, but he argues with the same degree of black&white fundamentalism with which he accuses NGOs such as Greenpeace of being prone to.
My second issue is that his viewpoints are so anthropocentric as to be wholly arrogant. As a result he argues certain points unnecessarily to death, while conveniently glossing over those environmental arguments which are less easy for him to swallow. The review by the FT of this book says everything else which needs to be said.
The Eco-fundamentalists principal goal seems to be the wanton and total annihilation of rational debate. - By: Mr Smith, 05 Jan 2008 An absolutely fantastic book.
In an ideal world, one not controlled by doomsayers, fear-mongers & sensationalist headline grabbers - this excellent book would be on the school science curriculum throughout Europe.
The truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth (which makes a refreshing change!).
Just read it!
