Despite some information overload, this is an irresistible subject, and readers will find Tasker’s richly detailed account...
An astronomical journey that explores how our cosmos “is an unseen creature that we are struggling to understand through the small sections we have uncovered.”
Headlines greeted the 1995 discovery of the first planet circling another sunlike star. The number now approaches 4,000, and more continue to turn up. Astrophysicist Tasker (Solar System Science/Hokkaido Univ.) joins the steady stream of authors eager to tell the story. After reviewing the dazzling technology required to detect planets millions of times further out than Pluto, she explains that planets form along with their sun from a whirling disc of gas and dust. Gravity and heat from the young sun eliminate nearby gas, so inner planets are small and rocky. Further out, gas and unvaporized ice remain, resulting in giant planets with thick atmospheres. Our system—four small, rocky inner planets and four immense, gassy outer planets in symmetrical orbits—gave astronomers confidence in their explanations, until exoplanets destroyed it. The first discoveries were huge “hot Jupiters” so close to parent stars that they orbited in a few days. Equally confusing were “super-earths,” with wildly varying sizes, atmospheres, and orbits. Well-behaved systems like ours barely exist. Everyone yearns to find another planet suitable for life, which would be similar to ours and at a distance from its sun where the temperature allows liquid water to exist. Many are turning up, but Tasker, no Pollyanna, reminds readers that Venus, Mars, and the moon are also in our sun’s temperate zone, and scientists still debate why Earth seems unique. An active researcher, the author clearly knows nearly everything about extrasolar planets, so readers will encounter fascinating details but also learn perhaps more than they want to know about star behavior and planetary formation and evolution.
Despite some information overload, this is an irresistible subject, and readers will find Tasker’s richly detailed account entirely satisfactory—until events overtake it in a few years.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4729-1772-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sigma
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
The Johnstown Flood was one of the greatest natural disasters of all time (actually manmade, since it was precipitated by a wealthy country club dam which had long been the source of justified misgivings). This then is a routine rundown of the catastrophe of May 31st, 1889, the biggest news story since Lincoln's murder in which thousands died. The most interesting incidental: a baby floated unharmed in its cradle for eighty miles.... Perhaps of local interest-but it lacks the Lord-ly touch.
Pub Date: March 18, 1968
ISBN: 0671207148
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
IN THE NEWS
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.
Award-winning scientist Jahren (Geology and Geophysics/Univ. of Hawaii) delivers a personal memoir and a paean to the natural world.
The author’s father was a physics and earth science teacher who encouraged her play in the laboratory, and her mother was a student of English literature who nurtured her love of reading. Both of these early influences engrossingly combine in this adroit story of a dedication to science. Jahren’s journey from struggling student to struggling scientist has the narrative tension of a novel and characters she imbues with real depth. The heroes in this tale are the plants that the author studies, and throughout, she employs her facility with words to engage her readers. We learn much along the way—e.g., how the willow tree clones itself, the courage of a seed’s first root, the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, and the airborne signals used by trees in their ongoing war against insects. Trees are of key interest to Jahren, and at times she waxes poetic: “Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” The author draws many parallels between her subjects and herself. This is her story, after all, and we are engaged beyond expectation as she relates her struggle in building and running laboratory after laboratory at the universities that have employed her. Present throughout is her lab partner, a disaffected genius named Bill, whom she recruited when she was a graduate student at Berkeley and with whom she’s worked ever since. The author’s tenacity, hope, and gratitude are all evident as she and Bill chase the sweetness of discovery in the face of the harsh economic realities of the research scientist.
Jahren transcends both memoir and science writing in this literary fusion of both genres.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87493-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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