Harriman House edition is a well-presented severe abridgement
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The Harriman House edition is an abridgement, or to be more precise, an excerpt of the more juicy bits of the book. The original 3-volume book covers many subjects with plenty of gentle 19th-century musings. This edition only contains extracts on John Law, the South Sea Bubble, and the Tulip mania in the Netherlands, in a very slim little pocket volume.
The edition however looks and feels fine, and would perhaps do as a present to someone who is unlikely to be seriously interested in reading the book, but more in browsing it in a casual leisure moment, and having it sit on their coffee table or their living room bookshelf.
This fact is, shall we say, not immediately obvious from the blurb on Amazon.
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Very readable and very relevant
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For a book so old, Extraordinary Popular Delusions is still a very easy read (untranslated French aside) and very relevant to the modern day. It traces the origins of "animal magnetism" for example, still around as magnet therapy bracelets and so on, and an excellent example of the conditions which lead people to believe the bizarre. The section on the Alchymists is a real highlight: a history of the field told through potted biographies of its practitioners, covering both the real and legendary aspects of their lives and characters.
The tone is dryly witty with a subtle sarcasm, and once you push through the unengaging subject matter of the opening three chapters (the first two covering fairly similar financial schemes, and the third the "Tulipomania") it's an amazingly compulsive read.
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A Bible for Skeptics Everywhere!
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This is a wonderful book. Although 161 years old, it could describe trends in 2002 - irrational exuberance in the stock market, astrology, Psychic Friends Network - you get the point. Worth reading for the Crusades and Witch Mania histories alone. Some of the evil done in the name of religion will shock you!
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How reliable?
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I read this book because it was listed on a "FT Non-Management Top 10" list at #1. So I thought... there was nothing to lose. i was right, however, it does get terribly tedious and in no place does the author try and explain the madness of crowds he merely describes them...there is a lot of untranslated French which throws you off. Buy it, read some sections then stack on the bookshelf...
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Entertaining review of half-forgotten crazes.
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This book is an entertaining review of a number of popular crazes that occupied the minds of the English during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some of its subjects are well known but others, like the passion for the catchphrase "What a shocking bad hat!", now long forgotten. Although around a hundred years old this book's continuing relevance is demonstrated almost daily by the proliferation of fads, crazes and popular delusions in our own time. It is pleasing to reflect that in another century such modern preoccupations as crop circles, alien abductions and satanic ritual abuse will appear as bizarre and absurd as duelling, tulipomania and the South Sea Bubble do now.
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