History is interpretation, not facts. Facts is - well - facts.

It isn't clear why the focus here is solely on history dominated by politics. Politics (as opposed to what used to be called "civics") is a wretchedly biased exercise in "real time"; why should we expect it to be otherwise when pickled and canned?

I've added this book to my reading list. The most obvious response to the review, though, is simply to list some of the other books read in the last year or two. Anything by Simon Winchester: "The Map that Changed the World", "The Meaning of Everything", "Krakatoa", "A Crack in the Edge of the World". Eric Larsen's "Devil in the White City" and "Thunderstruck". "A Thread across the Ocean" by John Steele Gordon. Russell Shorto's "Island at the Center of the World". Jared Diamond's books. For the truly long view read Richard Dawkins' "Ancestor's Tale". (Do yourself a favor with that last one even if you don't like Dawkins' politics; he keeps it out of this lovely book.)

Dava Sobel (start with "Longitude"). Ken Follett's Cathedral books. Henry Petroski's "Pencil" and "Toothpick" - these are explorations of the infrastructure of our society, not amuse-bouche. You can't understand the "point" of Thoreau without knowing that his family made pencils. A professor used the battle of Borodino from "War and Peace" as an example of systems engineering. There was a life of Lavoisier, a book on the "fallout" from Sputnik, and some (rather uneven) books of contrafactual essays. Alan Weisman's "World without us" is an excellent exercise in contrafactual future history.

What books (history or otherwise) are others reading? This is the best response to any assertion that the hoi polloi might not be paying appropriate attention to history. Personally I'm very unlikely to read much academic history. My best history course in college was a history of economic theory. The most unusual was a couple of semesters of the history of astronomy. History is an attempt to tell our shared human story. The last thing it should be is cut-and-dried.

Any search for broad trends in human history (if any) and to dig for truth in human motivations will require a very personal investment of time - some seekers (as demonstrated in a few of the other letters :-) will get very lost on the way. A good start is to read widely - and especially not to read only writers vetted by those we consider our peers. Read historical fiction, as well - it's much easier to pick out any artistic license. As Ursula Le Guin said:

"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."

Establishment history is simply Hirsch's stale Cultural Literacy repackaged for a particular political goal. Bleh!

So science "is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent"? It sounds like the hoi polloi have it just about right. Science twisted to corporate needs is indeed malevolent and dangerous. Yet its underlying power implies truth - that it remains admired is counter to the authors' thesis.

Fretting about how scientists are portrayed is a) inane, and b) backward. All professions are typecast in the movies. If you want to improve the balance of good guy depictions against bad guy depictions, focus rather on getting the science itself right. The authors touch on the absurdity of the antimatter theme in Angels and Demons, but don't recognize that this is a flaw fatal to the plot. Which is to say that the fundamental problem with Frankenstein is not the poor misunderstood Herr Doktor, it's that electrocuting corpses is unlikely to bring them back to life. Speculative fiction is about suspending disbelieve - not about suspending logic.

Hollywood makes precious little science fiction in the first place. What it makes are fables and action films. An important plot feature of Contact was whether the radio signal from Vega could have been spoofed by John Hurt's campy tech billionaire. Astronomical parallax - simple trigonometry - definitively says no. Other genres get fundamental science just as wrong. Daylight saving time plays a role in National Treasure - unfortunately there would still remain the daily variation in the Sun's position to leave the secret brick unilluminated 364 days a year. This mistake doesn't only insult today's scientists - it insults Ben Franklin.

So Michael Crichton said: "(i) Movie characters must be compelled to act. (ii) Movies need villains. (iii) Movie searches are dull. (iv) Movies must move." Nowhere does it say that "(v) Movies don't need to be logical." Gaps in science are like gaps in continuity - they jump off the screen.

Hire a few grad students as technical experts.