Last night I finished reading Francis Wheen’s book “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World“. This is a book by Guardian journalist Wheen that sets out to explore how modern thinking has been taken over by irrational and ill-supported ideas and frameworks. I picked it up in my local Oxfam shop and thought it looked like the kind of book I might enjoy; the cover claims that it is “hilarious” and there are other reviews that describe it as “entertaining” and “amusing”. I didnt really find much to laugh at in it and rather plodded through it, not exactly not enjoying it but certainly not lapping it up with gusto. I guess it required a bit more political knowledge than I possess and so I probably didn’t get all of the points it was trying to make. Still, there were some interesting part (I can’t remember any detail about what they were though…) and it certainly stretched my brain into areas that it doesn’t normally go why can’t be a bad thing.
Tim O'Hare 