One of our favourite books. Written by the famed astrophysicist and published in 1995.
Here is why: "science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. 1 have a foreboding of anAmerica in my children's or grandchildren's time - when theUnited States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."
You can read it for free online: https://archive.org/stream/TheDemonHauntedWorld/The%20Demon-Haunted%20World_djvu.txt