{"id":1162,"date":"2011-08-20T21:08:12","date_gmt":"2011-08-21T05:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1162"},"modified":"2011-08-20T21:08:12","modified_gmt":"2011-08-21T05:08:12","slug":"review-the-faith-healers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1162","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Faith Healers"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Randi’s The Faith Healers<\/em> is pretty much a seminal work in debunking.\u00a0 Randi is one of the first, if not the first, to take a serious look at these people who travel from place to place claiming to heal the sick through faith for money.\u00a0 Randi and his team do a great job running down the evidence on how these guys operate and often spectacularly beating them at their own game.\u00a0 These faith healers are clearly just ripping people off and it’s great to see them called on it.<\/p>\n

All that said, there are some problems with The Faith Healers<\/em>.\u00a0 The biggest one is that it is a victim of its own success.\u00a0 In 1987 when The Faith Healers<\/em> was published, most of these techniques were unknown by people outside the “trade” and their brazenness and\u00a0 sophistication was surprising.\u00a0 Today a lot of this work has become much more widely known.\u00a0 It was a bombshell that these faith healers were using two-way radios during performances; now it’s a plot point on Leverage<\/em>.\u00a0 There are lots of other places for someone of a skeptical bent to find this information these days.<\/p>\n

While I love the good works that James Randi has done – this book included – I will say that I didn’t find him a gripping writer.\u00a0 All the facts are here and the information is clear, but he does not have the flair for narration that makes it exciting.\u00a0 When one is presenting surprising truth, that is not a great limitation in an author.\u00a0 Combined with the fact that I knew most of the raw information in here from other sources, it made the book something of a slog.<\/p>\n

As I say, The Faith Healers<\/em> is a victim of its own success.\u00a0 Its success comes from the fact that it is clear, accessible, extremely thorough, and convincing.\u00a0 If you have never looked into how faith healers operate, or why you should care that they are not on the up and up, this is a great book to read.\u00a0 As a template for how to lay out an investigative work, it is sound.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Randi’s The Faith Healers is pretty much a seminal work in debunking.\u00a0 Randi is one of the first, if not the first, to take a serious look at these people who travel from place to place claiming to heal the sick through faith for money.\u00a0 Randi and his team do a great job running […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1162"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1165,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1162\/revisions\/1165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}