In Kansas City ... and reading Unscientific America

I am now in Kansas City after getting here from San Antonio via a circuitous and inefficient route (which, nonetheless, involved getting a cheap airfare). I've spent much of my time in the air reading Unscientific America, which I've now almost finished. One chapter to go.

I'm going to keep most of my powder dry until I have time to write a proper review (not necessarily here), but I'm currently trying to digest the arguments, and I still need to read that last chapter (which will reveal all the solutions to America's woes of scientific illiteracy). But I'll just note one thing about the book that has been driving me nuts. Huge amounts of its substantive argument are tucked away in long expository notes at the back - often a page or more long. This makes the book almost unreadable.

For Zeus's sake, guys, next time find a way to work this sort of material into the text. It wouldn't be very difficult. Right now, the book reads like a first draft, and, to be blunt, it should not have been published in this form.

If expository material is worth including at all, it should be in the main text. If it's not important enough for that, it shouldn't be included; save it for another book. In this case, much of the substantive argument is pursued in the notes, and a reader has to be flicking back and forth constantly to try to follow the logic of what is actually being put. It's incredibly frustrating. Notes are for detailed citations, the occasional brief peripheral comment or qualification, or sometimes for scholarly apparatus such as the original of a quote in another language that has been translated in the main text. Or sometimes for (brief) witticisms. But not for the guts of the arguments.

If your editor told you to do it this way, he or she should be fired, because it makes your book a nightmare to read. Whatever its faults, it's quite lucidly written, so why spoil that with such an unfriendly structure?