Product Description

From salmonella in eggs to BSE, from the Millennium Bug to bird 'flu, from DDT to passive smoking, from asbestos to global warming, 'scares' have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world. This book for the first time tells the inside story of each of the major scares of the past two decades, showing how they have followed a remarkably consistent pattern.It analyses the crucial role played in each case by scientists who have misread or manipulated the evidence; by the media and lobbyists who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts; and finally by the politicians and officials who come up with an absurdly disproportionate response, leaving us all to pay a colossal price, which may run into billions or even hundreds of billions of pounds. This book culminates in a chillingly detailed account of the story behind what it shows has become the greatest scare of them all: the belief that the world faces disaster through man-made global warming. In an epilogue the authors compare our credulity in falling for scares to mass-hysterias of previous ages such as the post-mediaeval 'witch craze', describing our time as a 'new age of superstition'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80840 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 512 pages

James Delingpole
This brilliant expose of some of the most destructive delusions of our time should be compulsory reading for everyone (particularly journalists and politicians) and if people took heed the world would suddenly become a better place.

About the Author
Christopher Booker was one of the founders of Private Eye and its first editor. He has a weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph and a regular column in The Daily Mail. He has published several books including The Neophiliacs (Harper Collins), The Mad Officials (Constable), and Castle of Lies (Duckworth). Richard North is a political analyst who has been a research director in the European Parliament, and was formerly a nationally known consultant on public health and food safety.

Customer Reviews

If you don't think this book is important............
.....then try reading the chapter on satanic child abuse when your children are in the same room watching the T.V. I did, and an icy chill went down my spine. Imagine at that point someone came into your house, took your children away, accused you of the most disgusting crimes and gagged any attempt you made to speak out. Orwell, Kafka? No. Cleveland, Rochdale and Nottingham in the Twentieth Century.
This book is not about denial. Booker and North do not try to deny or trivialise AIDS, BSE, smoking related diseases, E coli, Listeria or any of the issues raised. Indeed these are major issues that require a well thought out and appropriate response.
The authors take issue with the scientists who push their own research and exclude any notion that alternate research might show something to the contrary. They round on lazy jounalists who do not research facts for themselves and compete for the most sensational headline.
Mostly however, they condemn politicians who settle on the current orthodoxy and take disproportionate measures, cost millions or even billions to the taxpayer and yet fail to do any good whatsoever (what the authors call 'taking a sledgehammer and missing the nut')
What is most telling is that once the scare has been proved to be groundless, the powers that the authorities have taken for themselves to solve the problem are never given back.
An excellent read, concise and well referenced. A copy should be sent to evey politician bureucrat and pompous town hall official in the land.

The scare phenomenon
Booker and North posit a "scare phenomenon" by analysing a series of scares, starting with HIV/AIDS and salmonella in the 80s, though BSE, the Y2K bug and passive smoking amongst others, to the global warming scare of today. They identify a pattern that starts with scientists making exaggerated claims based on inadequate evidence, becoming so obsessed with their theories that they manufacture evidence to support them while excluding consideration of contradictory data, and then actively suppress those who oppose their "new orthodoxy". The media, finding such scares make good copy, further hype them up, often finding scientists to speak in support of them whose own areas of research were quite different. Politicians, unable to distinguish between good and bad science and reliant on officials who have in many cases become members of the new orthodoxy themselves, and faced with media hysteria, overreact under cover of the "precautionary principle" by implementing policies that are scientifically suspect and economically damaging.

I purchased the authors' first joint book, "The Mad Officials", some dozen years ago after hearing Richard North speak, very entertainingly, on the excesses of environmental health officers. I was greatly entertained by that book's humorous, "if you didn't laugh you would cry" style. This is a much more scholarly work, although, thankfully, still flavoured by a wry sense of amusement at the irrational behaviour of many of those who would tell us how to live.

The book's longest chapter is on global warming, the biggest of these scares and one that is still gaining momentum. The authors provide a short history of the development of the theory of the "greenhouse effect" (from 1827) and some alternative theories, reminding us that many of those who expounded the theory of man-made global warming in the 80s had, ten years previously, been warning of a coming ice age. They analyse the development of the IPCC and how as early as 1989 scientists whose research did not support this "new orthodoxy" were having their funding withdrawn and were, in due course, lumped together with "holocaust deniers". Al Gore comes in for much criticism. Much of material will not be new to those interested in the global warming debate, but it is summarised concisely and clearly. You would be correct in deducing that Booker & North are somewhat sceptical of MMGW; what they add to the debate is explaining the current furore over global warming as another example of the "scare phenomenon".

In the epilogue they suggest that subscribing to movements like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in some way satisfies a human "need for religion" in a secular age. While there may be something in this, here Booker & North appeared to be moving out of their own area of expertise, the ideas were only lightly sketched out and there were, unusually, no references to those whose ideas were culled - e.g., Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? They also betrayed their British orientation: the statement that, by the end of the C20, "the prevailing values of the West were as completely secularised as those of any society the world had ever known" may be true of the UK, but not, I would have thought, of the US. These criticisms aside, I would heartily recommend "Scared to Death" as a critique of contemporary western societies' tendency to indulge in "scares" and as a call to arms for a more intelligently sceptical approach.

Booker & North conclude cheerily by warning us that this century will probably deliver us a "real crisis" soon enough, and that there will then be little time, or need, for imaginary ones.

An excellent analysis
An excellent book that surgically dissect the mass hysteria phenomena, and how lazy journalism associated with knee jerk political reaction brings untold damage.

It is interesting to see how mass media always look forward, but conveniently never look back at the last scare story (Did Newsweek came back on their 'Global cooling' from the seventies ?'

The most dangerous of all scares, global warming is the only story for which we don't have a conclusion, since we are very much in the middle of it.

Looking at the previous financially disastrous decisions on other cases, one can only fear the next stage of this non sense mass hysteria.

The authors references to 1984 by George Orwel sounds ominiously correct when witnessing how any dissenting voice is being treated.

A courageous work, lucid and full of intellectual integrity by North and Booker.

Warmly recommanded to anyone who wants more than the lobotomized, ready to digest version served daily by the mass media.