BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth (1969) R. Buckminster Fuller I came to this 1969 cult 'classic' in the fervent hope that it might allow me, finally, to 'get' modern environmentalism for which this is a seminal text. Part of my subsequent lack of enthusiasm is down to style. There is no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was a genius of sorts - at least as an engineer, planner and technologist - but he writes like a 'speak your weight' machine with a propensity for creating neologistic compound words that would put German philosophy to shame. Far from inspiring, the man just cannot write imaginative prose and yet his subject cries out for imagination. I am sure that he says precisely what he means but it is next to impossible to sustain an interest while being hectored by a person, no doubt kindly in intention in his way, who is egotistical to the nth degree - a 'speech-talker', as my daughter would term such types. Still, great thoughts are

Introducing Eastern Philosophy (1992) Richard Osborne   Introducing Baudrillard (1996) Chris Horrocks   Introducing Nietzsche (1997) Richard Gane & Richard Appignanesi  Introducing Lacan (2000) Darian Leader & Richard Appignanesi Introducing Existentialism Richard Appignanesi Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called 'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short Introductions to ..." which started in 1995. Inbetween came instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing ..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s. The series included graphic accounts of significant modern philosophers and ideas. The original idea be

Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival: The Man Behind the Mystery of the Cathedrals (1990)   Genevieve Dubois  The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000) Colin and Damon Wilson   The Secret History of Lucifer; The Ancient Path to Knowledge and the Real Da Vinci Code (2005) Lynn Picknett   Who Are The Illuminati? (2005)  Lindsay Porter   Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (2008) Daniel B. and Jason Freeman   Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions (2009) Ronald H. Fritze We will start by getting rid of the worst book. The translated tome on Fulcanelli the alchemist is dreadful - poorly written, obscure, poorly translated, poorly edited, pompous, deeply incoherent and providing no context or analysis. It contains some interesting photographs and some less interesting but at least accurately photographed documentation. You are left with an impression of a set of more than a little nutty marginalised figures living from hand to mouth on their eccentric