Author Description

This latest collection of Gardner's essays and reviews includes articles on the puzzles in James Joyce's Ulysses and on the fantasies of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C.Clarke, Lord Dunsany, Gilbert Chesterton, and H.G.Wells. Gardner expresses opinions about the "anthropic principle", computer programs capable of discovering scientific laws, the philosophy of W.V.Quine, Marvin Minsky's view of how the mind works, the idiosyncrasies of Allan Bloom, the reality of unknown digits that "sleep" in pi, and whether physicists are really on the verge of discovering everything. A highlight of the book is a review from the "New York Review of Books" in which Gardner, using a pseudonym, blasted his own book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener".