By: Carl Sagan
ISBN 0-394-53512-X
Review Written: 07-14-1996
In this book Carl Sagan turns his piercing intellect toward the problem of the flood of pseudoscience, antiscience, illogic and unreason that is unfortunately flooding the popular consciousness. In bookstores full of credulous volumes proclaiming the validity of UFO abductions, faith healing, "creation science" and the like, this book is a breath of fresh air. I heartily recommend it for your own personal reading, to give as a gift, to send to your legislators and to donate to your local school's library.
Among the many interesting and useful things in this book, Dr. Sagan provides a "baloney detection kit". These are simply a few basic tools of logic and skepticism to help a person to differentiate between what's plausible and what's nonsense.
Dr. Sagan discusses the scientific method, what science is and isn't and why its important that more people adopt a rational scientific worldview over the all too tempting mysticism that all too many accept as real.
As always, Dr. Sagan's writing is lively and enjoyable. This isn't a dry, dull textbook spouting statistics, but an impassioned, though logical, treatise on what he believes is the base cause of most of modern human society's problems. This is a must have for skeptics and freethinkers everywhere. The really unfortunate thing is that the people who need to read this most probably won't.