Like many anthologies, this book was a mixed bag. The debunking of certain myths was very helpful, particularly "Medieval Christians taught that the Earth was flat," "Copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the cosmos," and "Descartes originated the mind-body distinction." The book may be worth a gander for those chapters alone. The more the writers got into twentieth- and twenty-first century live wire issues, though, the less helpful I found it. The Intelligent Design chapter, for instance, I found rather gratuitous and out of line with the rest of the book. Throwing around terms like "fundamentalist," "traditionalist," "freethinking," and even "creationist" is so often a recipe for disaster, sadly even when one is a historian...

Still, even the chapters on Scopes and global creationism had a few helpful points, and it's a useful book in a "troubling the waters" sense. ( )