Planets: A Smithsonian Guide
by Thomas R. Watters
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1995
hardcover, 256pp. color illus.
ISBN 0-02-860404-0
US$24.95/C$34.95
The number of guidebooks written about the planets is certainly far greater than the number of planets; at times it seems to compare to the number of asteroids or comets in the solar system. Given that kind of population, a book that provides an overview of the solar system needs to stand out in some positive way. Some books have chosen the route of detailed, informative content, such as Beatty and Chaikin's "The New Solar System". Others have disdained text for lots of glossy, colorful pictures from spacecraft and telescopes. Despite the auspicious title, Planets: A Smithsonian Guide has chosen the latter route.
This is not to say that Planets is another text-free picture book. Thomas Watters, chairman of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, is no intellectual lightweight, and he does provide a considerable amount of text. The book starts with a historical overview of our understanding of the solar system and then covers the Sun, each planet, and the asteroids and comets, devoting up to 20 pages per body. A series of charts and maps at the end of the book provides useful comparisons among the planets.
Often, though the layout of the book -- with lots of color pictures and illustrations -- tends to distract the reader from the text. The text does have a few egregious errors in it: in one case, it refers to the proposal that the Moon was spun off from the Earth has the fusion hypothesis (when "fission" would have been a more appropriate term). It also suffers on occasion from what might be termed as "Overprecise Metric Conversion Syndrome": when approximate dimensions are given in English units (feet, miles, etc.) they are often converted to exact metric measures, even though the original values were nowhere near that precise. A minor, but annoying, nit to pick.
The typical reader of SpaceViews will probably learn only a little about the planets from this book: the focus is a general introduction for a layman not familiar with the solar system (or at least not with our current state of knowledge about it). For a friend or family member who has become curious about our celestial neighborhood, however, Planets may serve a good introduction.
Blind Watchers of the Sky: the People and Ideas that shaped Our View of the Universe
by Rocky Kolb
Helix Books (Addison-Wesley), April 1996
hardcover, 338pp, illus.
ISBN 0-201-48992-9
US$25.00/C$34.00
In terms of volume of books, perhaps the only astronomy-related area that can complete with the solar system is cosmology, and in particular the evolution of our views of the universe. We've read time and time again the transformation of our worldview (or perhaps more precisely our "universeview") from the rigid Earth-centric Aristotleism to a Sun-centered, then Galaxy-centered, to now a definite centerless view of the universe. Blind Watchers of the Sky reminds us that these transformations were accomplished by brilliant but certainly imperfect people, and thus provides a welcome new look at cosmological history.
The title of the book, a quotation by Tycho Brahe ridiculing those who watch but do not truly observe and understand the sky, is ironic, for Kolb focuses on those who did understand the universe in a way no one had done before. Kolb's focus in on the human side of history: he looks at the lives of people like Brahe, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, among others. This adds a new dimension to history: we can now not only see that Kepler discovered his laws of motion, but how he was motivated and driven to find those laws. This focus on the human side of cosmological history is dulled in the latter portion of the book, which concentrates more on ideas, but there are still profiles of astronomers like William Herschel and Edwin Hubble.
Kolb's emphasis on the lives of leading astronomers would not have succeeded nearly as well if it weren't for his lively writing style. Kolb's sharp wit is evident throughout the book and lives up not only discussions of theories of the universe, but the lives and times of the astronomers who discovered it. (Residents of New Jersey note: you are at the sharp end of at least a couple of Kolb's barbs, as in: "I could never have imagined so many strange misconceptions... First of all, she [a student] seemed proud to be from New Jersey.")
The history of ideas that are the theme of this book are probably familiar to most SpaceViews readers. However, the history of the people who developed these ideas are probably much less familiar even if you're familiar with both the history of the ideas and the people, Kolb's lively writing style makes this book fun to read, and it is certainly one of the most enjoyable books about the history of our views of the universe in recent years.
To Rise from Earth: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Spaceflight
by Wayne Lee
Facts on File, 1996
hardcover, 310pp, illus.
ISBN 0-8160-3353-6
US$35.00
Spaceflight has, almost by definition, been a field plagued with the notion that it is been complex and difficult to understand. After all, how often have you heard someone trying to downplay the difficulty of something by saying, "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out!" The truth, of course, is that spaceflight is no more complex than many other fields of science and engineering. Wayne Lee tries, and to a large extent succeeds, in bringing the concepts of spaceflight down to Earth in his book To Rise from Earth.
The first few chapters of the book look at the basics of spaceflight, with a discussion of how rockets and orbits work, an introduction to orbital mechanics, and a look at the basics of common space maneuvers, such as raising and lowering orbits and changing inclination. Later chapters take a more applied and even historical view of spaceflight, with a look at the history of the moon race, how the space shuttle works, planetary exploration, and future missions to Mars (it's worth pointing out that the author works for the Mars Global Surveyor Project at JPL.)
Numerous illustrations, all produced by the author, help the reader picture much of the orbital mechanics discussion in the text. At times, though, Lee goes overboard with the use if illustrations and images: the chapter on orbital mechanics features nearly one space shuttle view of Earth per page, none of which is relevant to the discussion at hand. The book also suffers from a number of typos (including the unfortunate misspelling of NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's name as "Golden") and even a few bizarre statements (Lee writes that there is an undiscovered planet as massive as Neptune or Uranus far beyond the orbit of Pluto; a statement disproved by research by JPL's Myles Standish, who has shown there is likely no such body in the far outer solar system.)
The key problem with this book is that it is probably too ambitious: it tries to cover nearly everything about spaceflight from the theoretical basis to plans for future missions. This is difficult to do in any single volume, but especially in a book designed for the space neophyte. A pared-down version that focuses on the strengths of this book -- orbital mechanics and related areas -- would be a welcome revision. Until then, though, the reader looking for a good introduction into the mechanics of spaceflight would do much worse than this book.
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