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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Also perhaps Bill Bryon's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for an entertaining broad view of a variety of scientific areas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Every...

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The Demon-Haunted World was incredibly formative for me, and I was around 14 when I first read it. Prior to reading it, I believed wholeheartedly that UFOs were alien spaceships, and despite already being fairly certain I was an atheist, I was still on the fence about ghosts. The most important thing about that book was that it didn't teach me that things I believed weren't true because a distinguished scientist said so; rather it taught me how to decide whether the things I believed were likely to be true, and how to examine why I believed them.

Of course I didn't immediately transform into a perfect 14-year-old skeptic by reading this book (I'm twice that age now and I'm sure I still believe all manner of things that aren't true), but this was the first time I truly realized that I even needed to be skeptical about what I believed.

I could have written your comment! My father bought me that book when I was about 16 or 17 years old, as a birthday gift. At the time, I too was an atheist, but not a very skeptical one, and TDHW had a huge impact on me.

That book is one of the only gifts I can remember recieiving when I was a teenager, and I still have it on my shelf. It is fair to say that it can be a life changer.

I second "A Brief History" -- it's kind of like Cosmos (the book by Sagan) but more up-to-date and slightly broader.

It seems to me that a lot of the suggestions are are people trying to impress each other with what they've read rather than books they think a bright 14 y.o. might really enjoy or get something out of.

I have a very worn copy of the book in Cosmos that I got in '83 - it's an excellent book and I love it, but I wonder if that's because I also loved the TV series.

I read Cosmos having not seen the series (living in Australia at the time) and it is a great book. I think A Brief History is a similarly pitched book that's somewhat more up-to-date, and Bill Bryson is still around to revise it.

"A Short History of Nearly Everything" is my favorite book. If you're not much of a reader, listen to this in audiobook format (great narrator). This book makes science entirely accessible and inspiring, and human nature humble.

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