Rating: 
Summary: A must for anyone's library.
Review: Adding this book to anyone's library would be a wise move. This book brightens the darkness we've allowed ourselves to be fooled into. It gives us the only reasonable, plausible, provable explanations for the unknown. This book helps us realize what a firm grip pseudoscience has on our history. Demon- Haunted World gives us the tools we need so that we can scrutinize and think critically and how not to let ourselves be taken in by the confidence game played by purveyors of pseudoscience. It informs us of the steps we need to take so that we are constantly progressing as a society. Demon- Haunted World is a call to science and clearer thinking but the reader must not forget what makes us human. The reader must draw their own conclusions without becoming distrustful of everything presented before them. The legitimate picking apart of religion and its leaps of faith does not release us from its ideals. After reading this book some of us may come to the personal conclusion that religions are a hoax. But this does not give us the excuse to abandon the beliefs that religion have to offer as well. Respect. Truth. Honesty. The willingness to help those less fortunate, not for the belief in the rewards of an afterlife, but for the simple belief that you should. Should you purchase Demon- Haunted World one shouldn't just read it and subscribe to Carl Sagan's views. The point of the book is that we should be wise enough to make up our own minds.
Rating:
Summary: A very influencial book
Review: In reading a couple of reviews that are posted on here I get the fealing that someone might mistake this book for a book that challenged everthing in our society and flatly tells that it is wrong. Sagan does not do this, the book is about how our society blindly follows certain 'truths' that don't have any basis in logic. The book is asking people not to accept his views on everthing but to lean how to think critically and how to apply critiacal thinking in real life. Somthing that more and more of us should do.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for all college science majors like myself
Review: Sagan discusses how in today's society science is looked upon strongly to solve many problems. Yet, the incredible amount of "psuedoscience" that fascinates our society is taken to be at full value. Sagan discusses questionable scientific topics as UFO's, telepathy and so on. His main point is to remind us that all we have to answer today's question with is science. If we don't fully appreciate the scientific method and put aside our social tendencies we could lose it. I believe any would be medical student read this as they typically ignore most of the importance of their undergraduate education.
Rating:
Summary: A must read!
Review: This is the best book I have ever read on the subject of general science and society. It should be read in every introductory course to critical thinking. Another reviewer on here complained about it's fanaticism towards science and all the ills in the world that have come about to the rise in technology. Hello? Science does not dictate what we humans do with our growing knowlege. The movement of primitive societies to agriculture was a technological advancement...was this bad? No. Science offers simply a systematic way of observing the world...and it is self correcting despite what another reviewer has said...apparently he has not heard that science has disproved the theory of a flat earth. The Demon Haunted World was pure enjoyment to read and has a permanent place on my book shelf...
Rating:
Summary: Buy the book! Read it often! Share it with friends!
Review: Demon Haunted World has had a profound effect on my thinking. From "baloney detection" to sleep paralysis. This book should be required reading for all high school students AND their teachers. My respect for Sagan has increased many fold since reading this book. A sure fire antitode to religious fears and superstitions. David Hume would have heartily approved.
Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, powerful defense of scientific rationality
Review: This book has produced an unusual number of customer reviews, and it is unlikely that anyone will read this one, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway. Sagan writes beautifully, and he makes a very powerful case that the modern combination of awesome scientific power with widespread scientific ignorance is bound to lead us to trouble. As good a case as has ever been made for better scientific education for lay people.
Rating:
Summary: To the point, and no nensense.
Review: Ever since I was a little boy, I wanted to be a scientist. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that science was an esoteric pursuit and a black art. The Demon-Haunted World set me straight. Sagan's presenation of science as a fully approachable system of thought, even for the common person, rekindled my love of science at a point in my life where I had fallen out of love with God. This book is easy to read, lucid, and will hopefully change the way you look at the world around you. One does not need God or superstition to view the universe with a sense of awe and wonder, or to feel that there is a place for oneself in the universe, and most importantly to respect and care for one's fellow humans. Read this book and fall in love with science.
Rating: 
Summary: Hated it!
Review: I liked what Sagan had to say. Science rules - no doubt. But...he needed an editor badly for this book. Everything he had to say he said in the first 50 pages.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dominant Cosmology Reacting to Heresy
Review: Dr. Sagan laments the lack of scientific literacy in our society, and dismisses a Who's Who of phenomena unrecognized by orthodox science. DHW is engaging, and in places contains good sense. Certainly the scientific method, skepticism and critical thinking are useful. There is no doubt that gullibility, ignorance and nonsense are rampant in the world.Skepticism is less useful, however, when it becomes merely a weapon to protect a favored conceptual system; in DHW's case, materialistic, mechanistic scientism. Dr. Sagan favors the advancement of knowledge provided it doesn't stray from essentially Newtonian-Cartesian premises. But this notion of reality, besides being holistically unsatisfying, is being discredited by evidence from physics, consciousness research, and other fields. In DHW, we find a dominant cosmology reacting to heresy: the chapter entitled "Antiscience" is an almost fundamentalist blast at ideas incompatible with a materialistic ontology. It's remarkable how a bad 17th-century idea can linger. Dr. Sagan is fond of stating that science is self-correcting. In fact, the process is neither linear nor cumulative. The history of science demonstrates that knowledge does not continue to unfold within existing paradigms. Not simply new facts, but entire revisions of our conception of the Universe are involved. Until such revisions occur, that which cannot be accounted for by the current science is ignored or dismissed, sometimes with personal attacks on its proponents. Lost in Dr. Sagan's argument is the possibility that at least some of what he attempts to debunk might represent legitimate challenges to prevailing scientific models. Several of his targets are of course deserving. To his credit, he cites a few phenomena as worthy of further study. But otherwise he makes a carte blanche dismissal of virtually every idea and purported phenomenon that is inconsistent with his worldview. His biases are evident on nearly every page. He has much to say about critical thinking, but almost nothing about Consciousness or Mind. His cursory discussion of quantum physics neglects to mention that the field has overturned the worldview of early modern science. He goes on about alien abductions for so many chapters that I almost became a believer. It apparently didn't occur to him that the prevalence of the "pseudoscience" and "superstition" he detests might in some sense represent an evolutionary system-break from an older conception of reality. This last point is key. I see DHW as a conservative reaction to a present revolution in consciousness. Where the revolution is ultimately going, no one knows. During the process much will no doubt fall by the wayside, to be seen retrospectively as nonsense. In the meantime, Dr. Sagan's book has its merits, but seems to me to be a forceful argument for a limited and obsolete model of reality.
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Summary: Thanks! To science that is!!!
Review: This is a terrific book and I highly recommend it!!Sagan exposes cultic and unscientific though for what it is! Thanks to science I get to get an accurate portrait of the universe! Thanks to science I get to Live to be more than 30 years old! Thanks to science I can go to california in about 4 hours! Thanks to science I get to express antscientific rants on the internet and get a huge number of people to see how odd and irrational I am...Err, just kidding... Anyway read this wonderful book!Enjoy!
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