Books like We Have Never Been Woke

I decided to treat myself to re-reading one of the best Sci-fi books I had ever read. Many years had passed. So much so that I had only a vague recollection that the book was excellent. A thought process interceded, "The Odyssey" was released as a film and so I thought to renew my aquaintance with Homers epic poem. I then thought of "Illium" Dan Simmons scifi take on the Trojan war which in turn led me to remember how good "Hyperion" was.
I viewed the novel with both trepidation and exceitment; I was much younger when I first read the novel, was I now jaded and would not enjoy it? Was it not all that I remembered it to be?
My worries were foolish, the novel and it's sequel (The Fall of Hyperion) were all that I had remembered. One of the greatest works of speculative fiction ever produced.… show more.

Impossible accounts of saintly miracles, witch hunts, and demon-possession are "medieval," right? Wrong—or not quite. The fever pitch of these phenomena struck in early modernity—precisely when Newton and Descartes were alive and kicking—and not merely among the illiterate unwashed but among the most learned elites of the age.

Eire, an award-winning historian, takes the reader on a fascinating expedition through the most famous (and infamous) levitators and bilocators of that era and the voluminous documentary witnesses to their feats. At the end he brings the pile-driver. In the 16th and 17th centuries, "everybody knew" that levitation was real. How did it come to be that in the 20th and 21st centuries "everybody knows" it ISN'T real independent of data one way or the other?