Prakash Shenoy's Diary

The Demon-Haunted World is a collection of twenty-five essays, several written with Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan. The essays range in scope from eloquent paeans to science to impassioned denunciations of bigotry, from humorous accounts of a variety of pseudoscientific endeavors to serious attempts to understand the nature of alien abduction delusions. With intelligence and wit, and the rational calmness that is his trademark, Sagan takes on a wide variety of topics, among them: alien abductions, astrology, Atlantis, the Bell Curve, channeling, crop circles, demons, electromagnetism, ESP, the face on Mars, fairies, faith healing, magic, miracles, prayer, religion, Roswell, satanic rituals, therapy, and, of course, one of his favorite topics, UFOs and extraterrestrials. Only Velikovsky gets ignored this time around. Through each of his essays he extols the virtues of skepticism, empirical evidence and control studies, while uncovering a multitude of errors and weaknesses i