Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Carl Sagan's books and writings were responsible for a great revolution in my relationship with Science. But the more I read him, the more I started to see his weaknesses, and I think his greatest weakness has always been the way he treats the paranormal and the like. He has always been very superficial when criticizing the so called "pseudosciences", a term that, by the very way he uses it, only shows how his outlook on Science and on human Knowledge is short-sighted. Sagan sees Science as the supreme method for looking at and for understanding the Universe we live in, looking with despise on other ways of understanding reality (presently, I prefer to see Science as just one out of many different ways of grasping Nature's mysteries). I thought that in "The Demon-Haunted World" he would do a better, deeper work, because that was the very purpose of the book: criticizing the pseudosciences and naive beliefs. But to my deep disappointment, he just repeated his superficial approach. He does give some valuable information, like when he shows how hypnosis can be misleading (in cases of remembering allien abduction, recalling sexual abuse in childhood, or remembering having engaged in satanic rituals). But he fails to analyse the "pseudosciences" deeper. Only Astrology receives some concrete and sound criticism, when he says that it takes into consideration the precession of the equinox in certain situations and does not take it into consideration in others, and that Astrology does not take into account more recent findings of Astronomy, like pulsars and quasars. Another very bad and dissappoint comment in the book (another example of superficiality!) is when he lists three things that he thinks might have some true basis: reincarnation; human mind influencing computers' processing; and telepathy (apparently, the skeptical readers missed that...!). He simply does not give any further information on that at all. I now consider Carl Sagan a very superficial, uninformative, and misleading writer when arguing either for or against "pseudosciences" or any of our "Demon-Haunted World's" beliefs. If you really want to get a true skeptical analyses on issues like these, Susan Blackmore's works are far more satisfactory. Spare Sagan's works for the very first (and clumsy) steps in scientific initiation...