I'm in love with Ben Goldacre

Because I read so many books, I tend to form intense, passionate attachments to authors. I can actually get turned on by an author's style or voice. In that spirit, I would like to say that I want to make passionate, geeky love with Ben Goldacre's big squishy brain.

I first came across Goldacre through his Guardian column Bad Science and website badscience.net. Goldacre did the entire world a service by doing the painstaking but ultimately rewarding work of exposing Gillian McKeith as the fraudulent scold that she is. I am almost finished his first book and it is everything that I have always wanted to read.

Bad Science (The Book) is basically a fun, clear and concise distillation of the basics of scientific testing and trials. He uses real world examples to show how quacks, doctors, researchers, major corporations and the media routinely misuse data, either on purpose or because they don't know any better and how that dangerously skews our knowledge on a range of health and lifestyle issues.

Goldacre is scrupulously fair and hugely entertaining. Like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Neary Everything, it is a book whose enthusiasm for sharing knowledge is palpable. He wants his readers to understand that the fundamentals of science is not out of reach of the general population and that it is in all our interests to be able to make a basic judgement on a piece of research which could be used to justify costly but useless interventions.

I have a feeling this is one I will be using and returning to for a long time to come.