"No One in the History of the World Has Ever Self-Identified as a Pseudoscientist"

"Macmillan allegedly received upward of one thousand letters of dissent, mostly from scientists, enraged that a publishing house previously so reputable had sullied its image (and theirs). Gordin, who has a deviant taste for archival insults, quotes from some of the most vivid: 'annotated clap-trap'; 'a new low in the ethics of the publishing business!'; 'on a level far below science-fiction.' All the while, Worlds of Collision was selling a thousand copies a week, and Velikovsky remained curiously unhurt, taking comfort in the story of Galileo—shunned by his contemporaries, celebrated by history—as pseudoscientists are wont to do."

In The New Republic, Alice Gregory reviews Michael D. Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe.