This is a bit of a cheat, since I checked this one out last year, finished most of it, ran out of time and returned it, and recently got it back out.
Discarded Science gives a brief overview of a lot of different hypotheses and beliefs that we no longer accept as true.
Or at least, that scientists working within their field of expertise no longer regard as true. One surprise from reading this was just how many scientists are responsible for these ideas - usually either theorizing outside their field or unwilling to reject their pet theory even after experimental evidence has shown that it's false.
The second surprise is that what we might call 'woo' has a long history that parallels science, a history of ideas that are kept around because people want to believe them, even though the evidence shows they're not true, and even though, when applied to medicine, they're often dangerous or fatal.
Which kind of leads into my third surprise, which is just how boring this turned out to be. I was hoping for ideas that were fascinatingly wacky, and instead it's mostly just Biblical inerrancy, reincarnation, gold, vibes, and life force energy over and over again.
Grant compounds this problem by giving interesting wrong ideas like phlogiston and luminiferous ether pretty short shrift, while going on and on about Creationism and Intelligent Design. The book is organized by broad subject, but has no real throughline within chapters, and sometimes Grant just fires off trivia a sentence at a time. He also has a bad habit of repeatedly referencing an influential idea but not describing it in detail until after all the things it inspired.
My one cool discovery was the so-called 'Axial Theory,' which claims that the Earth used to have water-ice rings like Saturn, but in a great disaster, they fell down and melted, causing the Biblical flood. There are countless versions of 'the Bible is literally true, the Earth is 6000ish years old, and the flood really happened' in the book - this was the one that was genuinely fascinating in its strangeness.
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