Martin Gardner is, to put it as broadly as possible, a professional smart person. His job, as a columnist for Scientific American and the author of dozens of books, is to write about complicated ideas in an entertaining and educational fashion, and he's quite good at it: Gardner has mastered the trick of explaining complex ideas without condescending to readers or damaging their sense of wonder. He's also a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and a columnist for The Skeptical Inquirer, avocations which require him to debunk dozens of paranormal claims. In Weird Water & Fuzzy Logic, dozens of his short essays and book reviews covering good science and bad are reprinted in 46 short chapters. Of course, it's Gardner's attacks on the bad stuff that make the best reading, as he savages New Age religions, fake suppressed-memory therapy, spontaneous human combustion, and Norman Vincent Peale's strange Christianity, to name a few. Like all good debunkers, Gardner demystifies the process by showing us how it's done, giving instructions on how to defeat blindfolds like a faith healer and how to construct a Permanent Paranormal Object, examples of which are often held up as concrete examples of psychic phenomena. (They aren't, of course, but readers can use them to create a stir at parties.) Gardner has always been a master pop-science writer, but at a time when books on pseudoscience outnumber those on science, he's an entertaining necessity.