The greatest misconceptions, you're saying?
I'm not sure I understand. What I meant was that--tongue in cheekishly--it's as if there was a culture of people who get off on making and discovering connections between things. Hawking and Burke are good explainers and famous for it, so if you fell asleep in science and history class because the professor was boring, having things opened up makes you feel less of an idiot. You get a rush. My eyes always glazed over in high-school math classes, but then somebody loaned me a copy of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ and my teenage mind devoured it. As a teenager I got the impression that Calculus was something only brainiacs could understand and that I was too dim to grasp it, and then my Dad gave me his old, 1969 reprint of _Calculus Made Easy_ by Silvanus P. Thompson (F.R.S.) and things started to make more sense. Today I might be in a crowd and mention Hofstadter, Burke, or Silvanus and there'll be someone who's eyes light up, and you instantly know that they're not just aware of them, but are excited, too.
Oh! Right. I just wasn't sure about your use of the word "shibboleth." But yes -- I can sleep through all physical sciences in high school because that's not where I want to be, but if reading Bill Bryson or Wikipedia is where I want to be than I'm all over it for hours.
The book I was talking about is A Short History of Nearly Everything. If you want to start small, his book on Shakespeare is fantastic and only about 150 pages I think. Also recommend At Home and A Walk in the Woods. One of my favorite authors.