Books Worth A Read

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Psychologist and HIV researcher Seth Kalichman examines AIDS denialism, the movement that rejects the overwhelming scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS. He goes inside denialist circles, profiling figures such as Peter Duesberg, and shows how they use pseudoscience, cherry-picked data and conspiracy thinking to manufacture doubt.

Kalichman explores why people are drawn to denial: suspicion of authority, distrust of pharmaceutical companies and the emotional pull of rejecting a frightening diagnosis. He documents the human cost, most devastatingly in South Africa, where the government’s embrace of denialist ideas delayed antiretroviral treatment and contributed to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

The book also offers practical lessons for confronting other forms of science denial, making it essential reading for anyone studying how misinformation spreads and why it matters.

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The book provides a comprehensive review of renewable energy from an economic perspective throughout the last two hundred years, starting from traditional renewable energy based on bio and hydro energy. The focus is on modern renewable energy based on geothermal, wind, and solar energy. It emerged when innovative entrepreneurs captured opportunities for valuable energy services. As the services with renewable energy expanded, the costs of technologies decreased entailing global commercialisation. This enables larger access to energy and emission reduction of carbon dioxide, but also causes larger differences in the energy resources across countries which impedes international policies.

The data are presented in 70 tables, graphs, and figures, most of them original. Interpretation of the data are useful in support of decisions making about sustainable development in civil society, businesses, and policy makers as well as for the verifications of scholarly hypotheses and projections in energy and climate policies.

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Merchants of Doubt unfolds like an investigative journey into the machinery of manufactured uncertainty. The narrative follows a small but influential group of scientists who, despite their credentials, repeatedly cast doubt on well-established research - from the dangers of tobacco smoke to the reality of climate change. Oreskes reveals how these figures leveraged their authority not to advance scientific understanding, but to stall it, aligning themselves with political and corporate interests that benefited from public confusion.

What makes the story compelling is the way it exposes doubt as a deliberate product, engineered with the same precision as any commodity. Press releases, think-tank reports, and media appearances become tools in a broader strategy to frame consensus as controversy. Oreskes shows how this tactic exploits a core value of science - healthy skepticism - and twists it into a weapon against the very idea of evidence‑based decision-making.

The narrative ultimately becomes a reflection on the fragility of public trust. It illustrates how easily misinformation can seep into civic life when expertise is undermined and uncertainty is sold as truth. Rather than a simple exposé, the book reads as a call to recognize the societal stakes of scientific integrity and the responsibility we all share in defending it.