Astronomy contributor Berman tenders an overview of the Sun’s many qualities and associations mixed with solar encounters of the personal kind.
“Everything about the Sun is either amazing or useful,” writes the author. Say, it is the sole source of life and energy on planet Earth. What Berman particularly enjoys is the Sun’s quirkiness: that its primary colors are green, red and blue; that what it emits most strongly is the color green (and how that effects the human way of seeing, both day and night); that it bestows health in the form of vitamin D, and steals health in the form of melanoma; that its rainbows cast no shadows. The author’s history of our solar infatuation is fleeting but inspiring, and he offers fine chapters on sunspots; the transit of Venus (how it was used to determine galactic distances); carbon dating; magnetism; the cyclical elements of eccentricity, obliquity and precession; and the sad, excruciating steps of its demise. Berman also examines the Sun’s role in climate change, as he puts into context the human agency in such a shift. If Richard Cohen’s Chasing the Sun (2010) and Gillian Turner’s North Pole, South Pole (2010) went into more detail than Berman, they would be hard put to match his intimate association with solar activity. He has been lucky enough, whether on his own dime or on assignment, to witness total eclipses, the transit of Venus and auroras borealis, and he writes of them here with immediacy and a delightful peal of wonderment. A quick, smart and colorful biography of “yon flaming orb.”
Pub Date: July 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-09101-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
The origins of humankind have inspired endless speculation in myth, religion, philosophy, and science. In this scholarly volume, Portuguese developmental biologist Pinto-Correia elaborates on the history of one theory. From the mid-17th to the mid-18th centuries, battle lines were drawn between preformationists, who believed that all mankind was conceived in the ovary of Eve, and epigeneticists, who believed that development began de novo in each egg. Within the first camp there was further division between ovists, who believed future generations were encased within the egg like a series of ever-shrinking Russian dolls, and spermists, who saw a similar series of minipersons in the sperm head. Pinto-Correia's point is that the preformationists have gotten short shrift in the historical record, their ideas ridiculed and caricatured. But, she says, you can read today's homage to the genome as preformation reconfigured in the form of the idea that it's all written in the genes. Many will question that conclusion, however: Today's epigeneticists point to complex gene-environment interactions in development. In all fairness, the volume covers much more than an arcane chapter in the history of embryology. There are fascinating details on the evolution of thought in Harvey, Leeuwenhoek, Spallanzani (who preceded Pasteur in showing that spontaneous generation didn't exist), and numerous others. Many were skilled microscopists and experimental scientists who nevertheless reconciled what their eyes saw with what their soul believed. Pinto-Correia also elaborates on the denigration of women that colored many arguments, the importance of measurement and numerology (you could figure out how many Russian dolls you'd need, given that the universe was only 6,000 years old), and so on. (Stephen Jay Gould contributes a foreword.) In short, there is a rich meal to dine on—not to be swallowed at one sitting—but perhaps to inspire other scholar/chefs to stew about. (55 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-226-66952-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
A lucid and lively survey of Victorian explorers from Raby (English/Homerton College, Cambridge). ``For the English in the nineteenth century, abroad, and especially the Empire and the colonies, existed to bring things back from,'' notes Raby in a neat introductory capsulization. Bring things back they did, to a fare-thee-well, but they were also, the author makes clear, agents in the imperial juggernaut, ``part of a slow but inexorable process of domination and annexation.'' Opening the world to commerce may have been the end result, yet each of the venturers heard his or her own drummer and fashioned an inimitable style afield. Raby profiles Mungo Park, Richard Lander, and Heinrich Barth on their African sorties; Joseph Hooker's plant collecting in India and the mountain kingdoms to the north; Charles Darwin's monumental classification undertakings while being ferried about on the Beagle; the scientific entrepreneurs Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Wallace, and Richrad Spruce, who traded in beetles (a Victorian fancy), birds, and dried plants (though it is odd that Raby makes no mention here of the recent biopiracy controversies, particularly with Spruce, whose cinchona and rubber gatherings are a hot topic). And as women explorers have been given short shrift for their contibutions, Raby takes pains to chronicle the work of Mary Kingsley in West Africa and Marianne North's superb botanical artwork. Raby then turns his attentions to how the jottings of these explorers were appropriated and deployed by writers as diverse as Charles Kingsley, whose Water Babies Raby considers ``a coded tour round the scientific debates of the mid-century,'' and Samuel Burler in his utopian Erewhon, the romantic Rider Haggard, son-of-the-manse John Buchan, Dickens in Bleak House, and, of course, Conrad. Importantly, Raby shows how the works of the explorers shaped a new Darwinian and colonialist worldview, one that remains mighty influential in the modern imagination. (8 pages illustrations and maps)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-691-04843-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
