The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett (pseudonym of Mark Anthony)

A purported first novel, but actually a first novel of a pseudonym, this book is written sort-of in the style of Jane Austen. Sort of. It’s like someone trying to write in the style of Jane Austen but without quite the same sensibility (for lack of a better word).

It felt like a first book, but I guess this guy’s got a whole series of novels under his belt under the name The Last Rune.

Essentially, it seems like someone tried to breed Jane Austen and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and got something, but that thing is not likely to be able to breed itself. I’m straining a metaphor here, I see that. But “breeding” in this scenario would be a second book, which this author very much seems to want to write, leaving many unanswered (though not particularly interesting) questions hanging.

Regardless of whether it breeds or not, I shan’t be there to witness it. While this book isn’t terrible and kept me sufficiently interested throughout, there’s likely to be grander skies out there.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
-Charles McKay, Preface, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

“Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.”
-Bertrand Russell, 1959

There’s an interesting perspective put forth here, covering Reaganomics/Thatcherism, post-modernism, cults, quakery, etc., etc., essentially referring to it all as “Mumbo-Jumbo”. There’s a deluge of history related, presumably diffracted through the author’s lens.

The topics range so widely and in almost a stream-of-consciousness manner such that I can’t really give a general opinion. Some of this book rang true, some didn’t, some gave me stuff to think about.

I read with most interest the Reaganomics/Thatcherism part, largely because we are poised to try and solve this Second Great Depression issue, and there are some loud voices endorsing some trickle-down methods of stimulus (which the author puts in the Mumbo-Jumbo category). I’m becoming motivated to read more about the economic theory of Keynes and Friedman, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.

Overall, I thought it was an interesting book, though not overwhelmingly clear in its presentation. It felt more like a description of a bunch of wacky stuff that happened, rather than an organized argument. Which is odd, since this is a book about a supposed decline of rational thought in modern times.

The U.S./Canada title of the book is Idiot Proof: A Short History of Modern Delusions, which calls to mind the 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions, a classic work that I’ve read about half of¹. This book is not quite as scholarly as that work, but informative nevertheless.

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¹ I got really bogged down in the chapters relating the Crusades in Volume II, and haven’t gotten back to it.