The Demon-Haunted World is a hodge-podge. Sagan is a fairly good writer, but many of his targets here seem like straw-men. Of course, I'm probably overestimating the average intelligence of Americans, but does a significant portion of the population really believe in alien abductions and psychics? Maybe so. For me, the best part of this book was toward the end, when Sagan tells the story of Maxwell's breakthrough in electromagnetism and how it has affected scientific thought. In the final analysis, Sagan makes strong cases for revamping scientific education for schoolchildren and for public funding of basic scientific research.