Books like Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

It's very hard to give a review and rating for the entirety of this book. From chapter to chapter it feels disjointed and varies quite a bit in both content and quality. I seem forced to review the different parts and chapters individually. The first "part" of the book, titled "Science and Human Concern" and encompassing the first four chapters, showcases Sagan's eloquent and brilliant writing especially well. In these chapters I learned new things and gained a new appreciation for Einstein's incredible mind; One would be hard-pressed to argue the book doesn't start off strong. The next part, called "The Paradoxers", starts of well enough, explaining and refuting various pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs. But in chapter 7 Sagan spends over 50 pages refuting the claims made in a specific book called "Worlds in Collision" written by a specific author named Velikovsky. This would be fine if I were reading Broca's brain 30 years ago when it was published, but as it is I have never heard anyone repeating the ridiculous claims spouted by Velikovsky so I wasn't very interested in their refutations. I ended up skimming through most of the chapter. This is just one of the ways the book suffers from how dated it is. After this, part two continues with a couple good chapters, the first on theological arguments and second on science fiction. The next two parts of Broca's Brain are both mostly concerned with astronomy, space exploration, and humanity's future. They continue to vary in quality from a great chapter on Robert H. Goddard's tireless work towards space exploration to a terribly boring chapter on choosing namesakes for features of other planets. The final part skeptically examines religion and does a pretty good job until it ends with a chapter concerning hypothesis that explains religious stories and experiences in terms of subconscious memories of birth that's almost Freudian in its level of wild speculation. Broca's Brain is magnificent at times, but at times it's dense enough to make up for it, and overall it just felt too muddled for me to give it a very good rating.