The Demon-Haunted World
Sagan's guide to critical thinking and the scientific method, written as a passionate defense of reason against superstition, pseudoscience, and deliberate disinformation. In an era of proliferating nonsense, its chapter "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection" reads as prophecy. Reddit's most-recommended book about thinking.
The alien-abduction material goes “on and on and on about the evils of unexamined credulity,” with “far too many pages dedicated to something that was not science,” and readers quit deep into it still waiting for what they were promised. Sagan spends page-time on the Weekly World News and Beavis and Butt-Head, and admits he never watched the show he condemns. He wrote it “as chapters, publishing each one in a major newspaper as he finished it,” and the seams show as the same argument restated. The final stretch on science-education policy strikes readers as a “displeasing and concerning tone,” a more partisan book grafted on. And the “snotty, ‘now you see the error of your ways,' tone” undercuts the compassion he claims.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
