This slender book was first published in 1988 (I have the 1990 paperback edition) and became a bestseller. It was one of the earliest books on the very general theme of how many people don’t understand the world around them, or believe things about it that aren’t so. (This is what I mean, partly, when I refer to people who “don’t know how the world works,” in the sense they have no idea of proportion and size and thus no clue about what things are plausible or not – and thus are prey to so many conspiracy theories.)
