The law of diminishing returns is at work when one reads multiple biographies of the same subject. As I read each of the biographies of H. L. Mencken over the years, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading the same book over and over again. Each one promised to reveal some new and previously unobtainable information, but by-and-large it was the same version of the same story accompanied by the same quotations. Soon, it seemed, there would be more histories of Mencken than books actually written by him, and I vowed never to purchase another Mencken biography. This … Continue reading The Skeptic: A Book Of Calumny