Crackpot Manifesto: A Guide To Intelligent Insanity

What is a crackpot? Is a crackpot a crackpot if he or she is telling the truth? Is a pearl of wisdom any less a jewel when it is presented on the half-shell of humor? Throughout time great thinkers have been considered crackpots by the societies they labored hard to improve. Socrates? That particular pillar of modern thought was pilloried and executed by his fellow Athenians. Einstein? At first, forget it. His fellow scientists were too wrapped up in their own way of defining the universe. Then they bought it. Now a lot of them aren’t sure again.

Sagehood, it seems, is as fashion-dependent as music and, well, fashion.

In his new book Michael Roger Rogers conducts a very personal tour through the philosophic foundations of human life and the physical realities of our time. In chapters that cover the gamut of human experience -- from art to science, politics to diet, travel to the extremes of the imagination -- Crackpot Manifesto sticks a rapier tongue into the swollen cheek of our preconceptions and casts a knowing wink in the direction of the herd of sacred cows we call "conventional wisdom."

Eclectically organized, Crackpot Manifesto is a book that need not be digested as one meal or in any particular order (although a start-to-finish-in-one-sitting reading would arguably deliver the most impact). Each entry is short enough to quote -- and hard not to. The subject matter is nothing less than the lives we lead and have grown to love, hate, and -- all too infrequently -- question.

Along with acrid comments on our social habits and explorations into the nature of the earth’s power structure, Rogers has found time to provide an imaginative humankind-creation myth and an epic poem about a vampiric race of 500-year-old men who subsist on the oil of man.

There’s something here for everyone, and -- in the words of the author -- everyone is a crackpot. Crackpot Manifesto is, more than anything else, a call to arms for the armchair philosophers of the world. Speak your minds; unchain your brains! Your thoughts are as good as anyone else’s. (With the possible exception of Michael Roger Rogers, who is pretty sure he has the answer to everything. And you might agree.)

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