| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Fred Nadis. Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 318. $26.95.
What Fred Nadis calls a wonder show is a combination of science, technology, and magic, designed as popular entertainment. Some performances are shocking, some spectacular, many are sophomoric, requiring not only the audience's suspension of disbelief but their suspicion of the basis of scientific investigation: evidence. Nadis begins his energetic, impressively researched tour of wonder shows in the late eighteenth century and argues that these spectacles persist today, with demonstrations that include paranormal phenomena, alternative medicine, creationist science, and evidence of alien visitors.	1
He divides the book into three sections. The first focuses on performers who relied on electricity to create dazzling effects, inexplicable to awed onlookers. Electrical wonder shows continued into the twentieth century, as x-rays and radio waves provided new astonishments. The second section focuses on hypnotists and mind readers, who both drew on their audience's desire for belief in telepathic communications and spiritual connections and, at the same time, tried to debunk superstition. The third part moves into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on evangelical science shows, UFO proponents, and New Age productions, concluding with a discussion of current "science wars."	. . .

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