Well, not everyone-- after all, most of the 130s was in praise of poltergeists and feng shui. But the critical book I chose, Exposed!: Ouija, Firewalking, and Other Gibberish, turned out to be unreadable. Literally indecipherable in that there were sentences that just didn't convey any meaning to my mind. Maybe something was lost in the translation from the original French, but so much for that.
The redundantly titled 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True was slightly more readable, but it was in a different Dewey Decimal category for a reason. It really wasn't just about debunking specific beliefs, not just about the paranormal, but about various aspects of how people think the world works. It was really about exemplifying and promoting the philosophy of skepticism, which seems to me to be somewhat hollow. It's not so much a philosophy of life as an epistemology. All it has to offer is a certain way to approach knowledge, rather than a coherent body of thought, so I certainly wasn't going to read 50 essays, many of which boiled down to: "Here's a thing people think. I can't prove that it's true, so I won't believe it, which makes me smart!" The one where he pretended to be a psychic was pretty interesting, though. There he really did prove something: that it's not hard to convince someone that you are psychic even though you know you're not!
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