Flim-Flam! by James Randi. This is a fairly old book-- copyright 1982, printed in 1986-- that I picked up when we cleaned out Ralph Alpher's office. I actually finished this quite some time ago, reading it in bits and pieces during idle moments at work, but I've completely forgotten when it was, so I'll throw it in here.

"The Amazing Randi" got his start as a stage magician, and later moved into a career of debunking various fraudulent psychics. He's got his own foundation now, a standing offer of a million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate supernatural powers (the offer was ten thousand dollars at the time of this book's writing), and what is evidently a lucrative career as an author and lecturer. He's most famous for his lengthy legal battles with the spoon-bender Uri Geller, but will take on pretty much any form of pseudoscience.

I grabbed this from Ralph's collection of books because I've seen Randi speak on a couple of occasions, and he's a very entertaining guy. He feels no qualms about laying into those he feels are defrauding the public-- Erich von Daeniken, for example:

Erich von Daeniken is a Swiss author who has become one of the most widely read authors of all time. He earned this distinction by selling some 36 million books, and he sold them because they pandered shamelessly to the public taste for nonsense. The only facts in his four books-- Chariots of the Gods, Gods From Outer Space, The Gold of the Gods, and In Search of Ancient Gods-- that I depend on are the page numbers.

For fifteen years, he has perpetrated on the reading public what I characterize as a literary diddle of enormous scope. A simple examination of his work will demonstrate this. In fact, any reasonably intelligent person with access to a public library can disprove such nonsense quickly and easily.

Sadly, while this approach is entertaining in an hour-long public lecture, it starts to wear thin over the course of a 300-page book. At points, Randi gets to be downright snotty about his skepticism, and rather insulting toward the believers, many of whom are more to be pitied than scorned.

Individual sections of this are quite good, and valuable reading for anyone who might find themselves debating crazy people about the nature of the Bermuda Triangle. Taken as a whole, though, it eventually becomes fairly tiresome, as most such books do in the end. I wouldn't put too much effort into trying to find a copy of this.