I just posted last week a quick list of recommended books here: Book Recommendations: Critical Thinking Version. Last week I received my order from Barnes and Nobel that includedFollies of the Wise, by Frederick Crews and I started reading it on Saturday. I highly recommend it. Crews tackles Freud, pyschoanalysis, and repressed memories and successfully shows that Freud was pretty much a self obsessed quack that had little to no ethics while dealing with his patients and at times shows that he falsified patient outcomes to make his ideas look more promising.

From the Publisher:

Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years
ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought — Freudian
psychoanalytic theory — that had skepticism built into it. He gradually
realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual
questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and
institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized
that Freud’s system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came
to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience.

Crews has had the mantle of contrarian thrust upon him. Follies of the Wise
contains his best writing of the past fifteen years, including such
controversial and widely quoted pieces as “The Unknown Freud” and “The
Revenge of the Repressed.” These essays effects still reverberate
today. In addition, his topics range from “Intelligent Design”
creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness,
from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A
single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation
to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that
asks, “Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?”

I would also like to add to my recommendations for Carl Zimmer. I recommended Zimmer’s Parasite Rex earlier here: A Gently Mad Blog Recommendations. I would like to add Zimmer’s Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, Soul Made Flesh, and At the Water’s Edge. Zimmer is one of the best science writers out there right now. His prose is easy to read and he has a great skill of explaining complicated scientific ideas in a way that are easy to understand. You can tell, through his writing, that he just loves the subjects he writes about.

Soul Made Flesh is about the early years of the scientific discoveries of the brain. Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea is about Darwin and the Theory of Evolution. And At the Water’s Edge is about evolution as well but focusing on specifics of evolutionary theory whereas The Triumph of an Idea is about the overall theory of evolution and its journey from Darwin to today.

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