Crenshaw's Books & Decks

Take the style of Michael Moore's documentaries and old TV Shows, mix it with the explanatory style that you find in TED Animated Shorts on various scientific subjects, put it in comic form, add some personal graphic style. Voila! You have Science Tales. 

Science Tales is a book on what science does, how it does it, and why it is a reliable method of understanding and explaining the world. It is also a book on what Science is not. More importantly, it is a book on the importance of critical thinking to deal with any scientific or Fringe Science issue. His approach would also be valid for subjects that are not scientific, like History, or TV watching, for example.  

The themes discussed in Science Tales are: Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), homoeopathy, the case of Andrew Wakefield and the anti-vaccination nonsense, chiropractic, the landing on the moon hoax, fracking, climate change, evolution, and science denial. 

Cunningham  makes two terrific points in his foreword, which will help you to understand the way and passion he invests in explaining the themes discussed in the book:

Cunningham is a passionate author and graphic artist and you can feel that when you read Science Tales. He has the virtue of digesting scientific information that can be difficult to understand (all the fracking issue or the way genetic selection works for example) and present it in a visual and textual way that is easy to understand by anybody, a child in high school or your great-grandma.

I love Cunningham graphic style. It is very simple and schematic, a bit cubist!, but he has an amazing sense of colour and of aesthetics. Each chapter has a a different scheme colour that goes perfectly with the theme at hand. I always love such visual mindfulness! And some of the vignettes are very humorous as well. One of the things I did not like in the illustrations is when he inserts retouched or filtered digitalised images, which work well visually in some cases but not in others. Cunningham could have perfectly drawn those images himself, and the final result would have been more harmonious visually. 

Cunningham says that the reason why he choose the themes he discuses in his books is they were hot topics on any science blog or podcast when he wrote it. That is, they were mainstream topics of discussion. To me, that is one of the flaws of the book, that there is little that you would learn or have not heard of when reading the book as there are plenty of documentaries, scientifically backed, on some of the issues that Cunningham discusses. Why not focusing on other scientific topics that are less known to the masses? For example, how Statistics and are used to manipulate mass opinion, create false opinions and perceptions of the reality of certain social, cultural or ethnics groups. Or the use of psychology at the stock market to put down whole nations speculating on supposedly scientific mathematical/economical evaluations. What about the use of quantum physics to explain New Age religious stuff? What about magic diets backed up by doctors, which turn to be really damaging? Just giving some ideas, Cunningham!  

Also, using an episode of Mythbusters as a scientific reference defeats his own purpose or being, well, very scientific. Come on, hello hello, can't you see that?!Still, this is a very educative enjoyable book.

I am quite happy with the rendering of the book for Kindle. It is easy to read, the page to move around, zoom in and out.