Volume 26, Number 13 · August 16, 1979
The Half-cracked Hero
By Neal Ascherson
The Road to Khartoum: A Life of General Charles Gordon
by Charles Chenevix Trench
Norton, 320 pp., $13.95
Carl Sagan, in his latest book,[*] has been writing mordantly about 'the paradoxers,' those who make fortunes out of pseudo-science to service the occult explosion of our times. It is commonplace to see in that 'explosion' a defensive movement, an obdurate and childish flight from the authority of knowledge into Indian territory, into an empty place where a counterauthority can be set up and function on a barbarous parody of scientific law. But it is more than that. Hogwash gives energy. People become restless for change, impatient to rebel, but find that all the ideological weapons they might use have been locked up. And out of the junk and scrap of the past, they will manufacture their own.
Review, 3186 words
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