These have been busy weeks, and books pile up beside my bed.

From just looking at the cover of Phil Patton's Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51 one might think this another cutesy UFO book, but nothing could be further from the truth. Patton pulls the reader into a discourse of Cold War paranoia which has a lot more to do with Area 51 than Roswell.

Some years ago Erik Davis published an article on the mystical air surrounding the Internet which I cited in a paper on Innis, McLuhan, and Carey. Davis' article has since grown into Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information. This is an airy read and skims across the surface of the new culture without decending into too much critical murk.

On the cover of Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler is a reproduction of a grainy sepia photograph of Hitler as a young child. The question is clear: can we conceive of him this way, imagine him as an innocent, this man who defines 20th century evil?

Most interesting so far is Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, the English publication of which strikes me as something of a landmark.