I am a Ben Goldacre fan. I love science, but I love good science even more. I work in clinical research, so talk of critical appraisal of evidence fills me with joy. Increasing public awareness of the need to think critically about science is one of my major soapboxes. Scientific enquiry is a process, not a collection of facts. You form a hypothesis, test it, then (hopefully) send it out into the world to be pulled apart and put back together by your peers. Its brutal, but I love it.
Normally, I hoover up a Ben Goldacre book in days…

‘I think you’ll find…’ is not a typical Ben Goldacre book. Instead, it’s a collection of his newspaper columns, curated into themes or topics. It has the usual critique of other people’s methods, of governmental policy, of blind acceptance of science “facts”. So what was it lacking?

To me, it needed a good edit. Points were made, remade, said a third time under a different topic. The structure (to me) created redundancy –I read the same ideas several times.

If you are new to Ben Goldacre, it’s probably a great start. As a curation of his columns, everything is bite size and you can start with topics that interest you. My brother described it as a perfect “bathroom book” – you can pick it up and put it down, and never feel like you’ve lost the flow. It is written with wit, and each column in it stands alone well.

But if you’re a long term fan, it might fall short of what you expected in a new Goldacre book.

About as you'd expect, really! If you feel like being infuriated by quacks and lazy journalists or reading about Ben Goldacre's love of the scientific method, then this is a good book for you?

I got this for Christmas and then heard about it again on Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (or RHLSTP) so bumped it up my queue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv6z2vYyTBs

Ben Goldacre being awesome again. Worth a read for any sceptic thinking person.

I love Ben Goldacre for making good science accessible. He champions good methodology and defends us against really bad science and medicine.
Please read his other books first and then read this. It would make it a lot easier for me to be friends with you.

This one is not the place to start on your journey of good science. It is a collection of articles he wrote for the Guardian. Worth a read but only after you have read [b:Bad Science|3272165|Bad Science|Ben Goldacre|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327251503s/3272165.jpg|3308349]

I was a bit disappointed to see that Ben Goldacre's new book was just a collection of his mostly previously published writing - the majority of the book is made up of his Bad Science columns from the Guardian, and you can read a lot of that on his website (which I would recommend as a way to while away an idle afternoon). I was really hoping to see Goldacre get his teeth into subjects a bit more than he gets the chance to do in the length of a newspaper column.

The curious thing is that the short pieces of writing become one of those "greater than the sum of its parts" things: you get to see in ten minutes of reading how the same subjects have been revisited over several years of writing; and although you mostly have to join the dots yourself it turns out to be a very worthwhile read. Occasionally Goldacre adds footnotes - mostly these are where someone has told him that he needs to wait a year or five for some results to be published and the footnote points out that a year or ten has now passed without that happening (big surprise all round...). I've certainly read a fair chunk of this book before so I was surprised to enjoy reading it again quite so much. Despite being a bit of a doorstop it's a book that you can read in three minute chunks, though the short articles reel you in with that "just one more" thing and you suddenly find you've burnt tonight's tea.

Definitely looking forward to his next book.